S. Korean Principles Vs. Hunger in North

South Korean workers load rice onto a ship headed last year for North Korea. This year, the South, citing rights abuses, has delayed the 500,000 tons of food it will send north. (By Lee Jin-man -- Associated Press)

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"It was a decade of suffering for us," said Cho Nan-hee, general manager of the Citizen's Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees, a church-backed group based in Seoul.

A founder of the group was Kim Dong-shik, a Presbyterian minister from South Korea. Eight years ago, he vanished during lunch at a barbecue restaurant near the China-North Korea border. North Korean agents grabbed him and drove him across the border, where he was tortured and starved and apparently died in prison.

The abduction became well known to the South Korean government through the testimony of several defectors. They told authorities in Seoul that Kim had angered the North's leadership by smuggling Bibles into the country and helping defectors flee across China.

The pastor's disappearance, though, was never once raised in public by Presidents Kim and Roh. Under their "Sunshine Policy" for peace, they rarely criticized North Korea's human rights record -- and put no conditions on food aid.

For most of the past decade, Cho said, she could not persuade the South Korean government to help North Korean defectors stranded in China or other Asian countries.

"No one returned my calls," she said. "Funding for our programs to help the refugees dried up. But when Lee came into office, his people called us up and said, 'How can we help you?' "

Lee quickly made it clear that South Korea's annual gifts of food and fertilizer for North Korea would now have strings attached. His government wanted to audit distribution to make sure that aid did not go to the North's military.

Inside North Korea, food runs short every year, even in areas where crops are good. And South Korea's decade-old aid program -- this year, 500,000 tons of various kinds of food and enough fertilizer to grow about 900,000 tons of grain -- has become a building block in hunger prevention, international food experts say.

Lee's insistence on accountability happened to coincide with an especially troubled year for the food supply in the North. The World Food Program says staple food prices there have doubled in the past 12 months, as a result of flood-damaged local harvests, soaring world food prices and an unexpected drop in aid from China.

Here in Seoul, there are critics who say that Lee, by preaching human rights to a heavily armed dictatorship, has overplayed his hand and risks a domestic political backlash.

"Lee was not elected to sort out human rights in North Korea, especially when there is a threat of famine," said Andrei Lankov, a professor who specializes in North Korean studies at Kookmin University in Seoul.

"All South Korean presidents have domestic constraints on how hard they can push the North," Lankov said. "Pictures of skeletal Korean children will cause outrage, and bad relations with the North would also hurt economic growth."