In response to the crisis, Washington last week doubled its previous donation of food aid to the north. The promised 100,000 tons of grain represents slightly more than half the $45.6 million requested by the World Food Program earlier this month in direct response to the plight of North Korea’s children. Executive director Catherine Bertini says the WFP needs enriched baby food for children who are too malnourished to digest the customary relief meal, a handful of ground corn. Bertini reports that the program’s staff members in North Korea ““estimate that 50 to 80 percent of the children they have seen in nurseries are underweight and markedly smaller than they should be for their age. They are literally wasting away.''
Playing politics: The emergency food aid will help, but it’s not a lasting answer to North Korea’s creeping famine. The crisis is bound up with politics: North Koreans are going hungry because their Stalinist economy is collapsing, and the United States, Tokyo and Seoul are using food aid to lure Pyongyang into four-way peace talks and economic reform. Yet North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and his cronies are wary of any compromise that could loosen their grip on power. They’re prepared to do whatever they feel is necessary to survive - and they’re wildly unpredictable.
Managing North Korea’s collapse has become a top priority of the Clinton administration. The United States has 37,000 troops based in South Korea to help deter Pyongyang. Yet as North Korea deteriorates, fears mount that its leaders will ““use it before they lose it.’’ The endgame is no longer a matter of if, but when. As a Rand Corporation study concluded last year, ““The Korean Peninsula presents a strange paradox. Nobody knows what might happen this year or next, but everyone agrees on how things will look in 10 or 20 years. The North Korean regime is doomed in the long run.''
In part to obtain famine relief, Pyongyang last month finally agreed to attend peace talks in New York aimed at ending the formal state of war that still applies on the peninsula. And last week North Korea promised to lift a ban that has prevented Japanese wives of North Koreans from visiting their homeland for more than three decades. Japan, which has vast stocks of surplus rice, now is considering providing additional food aid. But anyone who thought Pyongyang was turning soft got a rude reminder last week. A squad of North Korean troops briefly crossed the demilitarized zone and provoked the heaviest exchange of fire with South Korean troops in two decades.
Why increase tensions along the most heavily armed border in the world? Pyongyang may believe that by instigating a fire fight along the border it reinforces the message that North Korea is dangerously unstable - springing loose more food aid from Washington, Japan and others. Some analysts also think that there’s a power struggle underway within the regime between hard-liners in the military and moderates in the civilian bureaucracy. According to this view, every time the moderates move to open relations with the outside world, hard-liners resist. Last September the incursion of a North Korean submarine on the South Korean coast led to a manhunt in which 24 North Koreans and 13 South Koreans were killed - just as Pyongyang was trying to persuade foreign businesses to invest in a new free-trade zone. This time, hard-liners may have wanted to pre-empt the Aug. 5 peace talks.
Once sanguine about a ““soft landing’’ in Korea - in which Pyongyang embraces economic reforms and gradual, peaceful reunification - U.S. intelligence analysts now predict a crash. In one scenario, reformers topple Kim in a palace coup and call for help from Seoul or Beijing - creating yet another delicate, hard-to-manage issue between Beijing and Washington. Or perhaps North Korea attempts to seize Seoul, hoping to achieve reunification on its own terms. One former Pentagon analyst warns of a human-wave assault down high ridges and hills where tanks can’t operate. This would likely come during the summer, when chemical weapons work most effectively and haze hinders air operations. The argument against such a disaster: China, North Korea’s neighbor and longtime socialist ally, can be expected to use all its influence to deter such an attack.
Could famine bring on the collapse of the Pyongyang regime? Conceivably, if North Koreans come to fear starvation more than they do the government. But so far discipline remains strong. U.S. Rep. Tony Hall, who visited the North in April, recalls visiting a maternity clinic where mothers were dying and 6-month-old infants looked like newborns. ““If you asked what they planned to do, people answered, “The Dear Leader will take care of us. He always does’,’’ Hall said. Whoever eventually rules a united Korean peninsula could pay the price for years. ““This is one of the few countries I know where the kids are growing up to be smaller than their parents,’’ says Hall. Some call it ““generational stunting.’’ ““If [children] are malnourished in these critical years, they can’t make it up,’’ says one U.N. official. For North Korea’s hungry kids, the endgame is now.
