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N. Korea's Stalinist Image Mutes Images of Famine

SEOUL—The young mother sat on a North Korean riverbank with her infant son. She looked listless and sickly, hot and weak. Then she leaned over and vomited violently. When the convulsions stopped, she sat up and cradled her baby in her arms before lying down on the rocky ground. Her baby sat over her motionless body, wailing and trying to rouse her.

This glimpse of life inside staunchly isolationist North Korea greeted millions of South Koreans when they turned on their television sets this summer. The mother's collapse was the opening sequence in an hour-long documentary on network television, a nearly nonstop montage showing North Koreans weakened or dying from hunger.

The video footage, along with photographs of emaciated and sick children that have been printed in newspapers and magazines around the world, have had an impact: Private donors in South Korea have donated $18 million in the last two months, more than triple the total they contributed in the last two years. When the U.N. World Food Program issued an appeal for $45 million last month, most of that amount was raised in less than a week, a record. When the food program issued an appeal for just $8 million for North Korea in 1995, the world yawned and donations fell $1 million short of the goal.

As North Korea lets a few cameras inside its closed borders, the "stealth famine" is coming into focus, and aid agencies say they are no longer finding that the outside world doubts the severity of North Korea's problem. But that's only half the battle: Even in the face of millions of starving children, many nations and people still have trouble writing a check for the Stalinist pariah state.

"We are beyond disputing whether this is a need; it's well established that the hunger problem is real," a U.S. official said. "But the North Koreans are not warm and fuzzy and likable people. A lot of countries remember sending goods up there and not getting paid. Then the North Koreans sell drugs to keep their embassies abroad afloat, they blow up airliners, and they talk like jackasses. The incentive to give is reduced."

The historical animosities are hard to erase. A Korean War veteran sent an e-mail to The Washington Post's Tokyo bureau recently complaining that if the United States sent even one grain of rice to North Korea, "it would be done on the graves of 57,000 Americans who died in the Korean War." Others say feeding North Korea has the long-term effect of extending the life of one of the world's most repressive and brutal regimes. That, they argue, will ultimately lead to more human suffering than the famine will cause.

Aid agencies continue to urge the world to distinguish between starving innocents and the totalitarian government whose stubbornness and failed policies have caused the problems. "Large amounts of food aid are needed urgently. It's the only way of feeding the millions of hungry people who are suffering through no fault of their own," said Catherine Bertini, executive director of the World Food Program.

But many people still can't bring themselves to offer large-scale aid, partly because of nagging suspicions that food destined for starving children ends up feeding a soldier whose artillery piece is pointed at Seoul.

Members of a bipartisan U.S. congressional delegation that visited North Korea this month said they had been denied access to areas affected by two years of flooding and this summer's severe drought. The delegation's leader, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), said the United States would be unlikely to provide significant new food aid unless North Korea made its distribution "fully transparent and verifiable."

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) said the group believed much of the food aid going to North Korea actually reaches hungry people. Harman said the delegation had no proof that food was being diverted to the military, but she said North Korea's secretive system makes it easy for that to happen.

No such diversion of food has ever been proven. "We believe our system works, and we have had no allegations of diversions," said Bertini, who has numerous World Food Program monitors inside North Korea to oversee food distribution.

Bill Richardson, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in an interview in Tokyo last week that there was no doubting the need for food in North Korea. "We do think the [food] situation is getting worse. . . . It is well documented."

But North Korea is suffering from its own ineptitude at public relations. It refuses to allow aid groups or journalists to visit the worst-hit areas. Its appeals for outside help have been unprecedented, but a half-century of preaching self-reliance seems to have made North Korea unable to admit the full extent of its problems. As a result, television, which has unmatched power to move people, has broadcast almost no footage of starving North Korean children.

"In Somalia or Rwanda, people saw these pathetic pictures on TV and right away they sat down and wrote a check for $25," an aid worker said. "That alleviated their guilt and made them feel like they were doing something. We got millions of dollars that way. But it isn't happening in North Korea."

North Korea also continues to use aid as political leverage, consistently demanding massive food aid from the United States in return for its participation in peace talks with American, South Korean and Chinese diplomats. U.S. officials refuse to link aid to the peace talks, and many see North Korean's dogged insistence on doing so as little more than blackmail.

Pyongyang's biggest image problem is its continuing bad behavior. Last September, as aid groups were trying to persuade the world to help starving North Koreans, Pyongyang sent a submarine full of commandos into South Korean waters. The sub grounded, and dozens of people on both sides were killed before the incident was over. North Korea sells missiles to Iran, and Pyongyang has been linked to trafficking in heroin and opium and counterfeiting U.S. $100 bills.

Still, more international aid donors, moved by credible and dire reports of starvation, are starting to ignore North Korea's unattractive government and trying to feed its people. Japan said this week that it was considering $10 million in aid, despite its concern over recent reports that North Korea kidnapped several young Japanese people in the 1970s and may still be holding them in Pyongyang.

Despite the misgivings of some skeptics in Washington, the United States has contributed slightly more than $60 million the last two years, in increasingly large portions. The United States has contributed by far the largest share of the $212 million in aid that the World Food Program says has been donated to North Korea since 1995. The food agency calls the amount raised so far "a drop in the ocean" compared with what is needed.

South Korea has given $19 million, the second-largest contribution from one country. Although Seoul's political misgivings remain strong, a Unification Ministry official told the Reuter news agency Friday that the government plans millions of dollars in additional aid.

South Korea's softening stance is illustrated by National Assembly member Cho Woong Kyo. Cho, 60, was born in North Korea and fled to the South as a 14-year-old refugee during the Korean War. His father was jailed and killed by North Korean authorities.

Like most of the 2 million or so war-era refugees living in the South, Cho says the best way to help the North Korean people is to remove the country's brutal ruling cabal. When the famine reports started two years ago, Cho opposed giving food aid to North Korea, fearing that it would only prolong the regime in power.

Then, in May, Cho visited the Chinese city of Tumen on the North Korean border, where he talked to many people who had been in North Korea and seen people suffering from the famine. The graphic stories he heard so moved him that he has become a vocal advocate for food aid.

"Even if they are starving to death, they will not beg," Cho said. "They would rather die in a quiet way from starvation. We do not hear a loud cry for help from North Korea, and that also has made the world more reluctant to help."

@CAPTION: Mothers at a hospital in Huichon, North Korea, earlier this month held their children, who had been admitted for malnutrition.

@CAPTION: An elderly woman in Anju, North Korea, gathered discarded cabbage leaves for food in the spring. The country is suffering from a severe famine, and many people eat only one meal a day.