S. Korean Principles Vs. Hunger in North
Seoul's New Conditions for Food Assistance Run Up Against Dire Need in Stalinist State

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 30, 2008

SEOUL -- This spring on the Korean Peninsula, human rights are on a collision course with hunger.

South Korea's new president, Lee Myung-bak, is asking tough questions about human rights abuses in North Korea -- questions that were all but ignored by his predecessors Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun.

But he is learning that high-minded principles can quickly run amok if your neighbor is an irritable Stalinist state on the brink of a food disaster.

Amid worsening shortages that the U.N. World Food Program says may soon become a catastrophe, Lee's government has yet to dispatch large shipments of free food and fertilizer that over the past decade have become an essential crutch for North Korea's crippled economy, helping millions to avoid famine.

"The delay in shipping food and fertilizer could end up hurting the average North Korean," said Kim Am-soo, a research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification, a government-financed think tank in Seoul. "It is a very delicate situation, and tension has increased on both sides of the border."

North Korea was barely an issue late last year when Lee won the presidency by a wide margin. Only 3 percent of people polled before the election named their northern neighbor as a primary concern.

Voters then were overwhelmingly focused on reviving South Korea's economy and increasing their own income. North Korea had backed away from nuclear confrontation and cooled its heated rhetoric, and it was disabling its main nuclear reactor.

Lee, a former mayor of Seoul and a self-made multimillionaire, promised that he would turbocharge the economy with pro-business policies. As a secondary promise, he said he would condition assistance to North Korea on economic and political reform.

When Lee took office in late February, Western diplomats generally predicted he would not make substantial changes in his predecessors' accommodating relationship with the North.

But he quickly changed the rules. At the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, South Korea voted for a resolution expressing concern over the lack of freedoms in the North, after years of abstaining or otherwise avoiding the issue.

Lee gave new marching orders to the South's Ministry of Unification -- the primary institutional legacy of presidents Kim and Roh and their efforts to increase trade, cultural and family exchanges with the North. From here forward, it would explicitly press for improvements in the human rights of North Koreans.

The orders delighted human rights groups in South Korea, which had felt ignored and received little government funding under Lee's predecessors.

"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."

Inside the Seoul government, there are mid-level specialists in inter-Korean relations who argue that South Korea cannot afford to put human rights ahead of economic ties, family reunification and long-term cooperation.

"Lee has yet to learn that finger-pointing on human rights is a dead-end policy," said one longtime government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It is perceived by the North Korean government as a challenge to their national identity."

North Korea has indeed bristled. It has test-fired missiles into the sea, expelled South Korean officials from an industrial park in the North and unleashed a snarling torrent of rhetoric, threatening to turn South Korea into "ashes" and describing Lee's policies as "ignorant" and "fascist."

With its dander up, the North has so far refrained from asking South Korea for the food and fertilizer that it desperately needs to avoid widespread hunger. Even if it does ask, it is now too late for fertilizer to be delivered in time to help the crop that will be harvested in the fall.

History suggests that human rights concerns cannot trump other issues on the Korean Peninsula, said Kim, the researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification.

"We have to exercise more tact," he said.

Special correspondent Stella Kim contributed to this report.