Welthungerhilfe should tell us why N. Korea expelled its country director

North Korea has expelled Regina Feindt, the Country Director for the German humanitarian NGO Welthungerhilfe, which has operated in North Korea since 1997, “[w]ithout warning or saying why.” Reuters describes Welthungerhilfe as “one of the few foreign aid groups to operate in the isolated country.” Welthungerhilfe is not simply accepting this result quietly:

Feindt’s colleague Karl Fall, who had worked in the country for 12 years, left of his own volition the next month, it said.

“Welthungerhilfe does not see anything in Mrs Feindt’s behaviour that would have justified an expulsion,” it said in the statement.

It said Feindt left North Korea on Feb 26 and that Fall left on March 19. Feindt and Fall were not available to comment, Welthungerhilfe said.

The abrupt departures came as a surprise to members of the small foreign community in Pyongyang, according to a regular visitor to the North Korean capital who wished to remain anonymous, citing the sensitive nature of working there. [Reuters, James Pearson]

So what led to Feindt’s expulsion? Welthungerhilfe wouldn’t comment and claims not to know, and a separate report from Der Spiegel is similarly silent. That seems rather unlikely. Welthungerhilfe must know, but is probably afraid of saying for fear that the North Koreans will retaliate by expelling its remaining workers.

Indeed, despite the departures of Feindt and Fall, Welthungerhilfe “still has a skeleton presence in North Korea,” working on projects “to improve water and sewage systems in cities were unaffected.” Those projects are said to be unaffected so far, but Welthungerhilfe was also involved in a crop-substitution program to teach North Koreans to grow potatoes. Welthungerhilfe says it is “in discussions with the North Korean authorities to secure a basis for continuing our development work” there, which suggests that the NGO’s future activities are in jeopardy.

There are some indications on Welthungerhilfe’s own web site that it had clashed with Pyongyang over monitoring. At this page, for example, Welthungerhilfe says, “In April there were no visits and travel to Welthungerhilfe project regions because of conflicts and provocations,” but it does not elaborate further on what those conflicts and provocations are. In the apparent pursuit of equivalence, it also blames both “sanctions” and “controls” — apparently sanctions imposed by foreign countries and controls imposed by the regime — for affecting “the time schedule and organisation of the project work.”

That Welthungerhilfe was insufficiently compliant for Pyongyang is saying something. The NGOs that still remain in North Korea today tend to be the most compliant ones. (The less compliant ones left over complaints about diversion and manipulation years ago.) For example, Welthungerhilfe blames North Korea’s food crisis — the longest ever experienced by an industrialized society — as “due to the cold winters, dry soils, drought periods alternating with heavy rainfall,” but not on North Korea’s restrictions on private agriculture, imports, and markets, or on the fact that instead of importing more food, North Korea squanders many times what it receives in food aid on weapons and luxury goods.

Welthungerhilfe was among the NGOs that criticized the Treasury Department for blocking North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank from the financial system for handling transactions related to proliferation. North Korea required foreign NGOs to use the FTB, and consequently, at least for a time, the blocking had collateral consequences for those NGOs.

If disputes about monitoring, transparency, and distribution led to the departures of Feindt and Fall, that’s a matter of great public interest to donors and governments everywhere. For the reasons I’ve explained here, Welthungerhilfe should tell us what those reasons were.