One Kwangju Per Day for Six Years

Lately, I’ve been researching some of the different death toll figures for the North Korean famine–the one that peaked in the 1990’s, continues to this day, and which the WFP now says is threatening to reemerge. Here’s a summary:

• The most often-cited estimate of the death toll is two million. A 1999 CNN report estimated that by then, the famine had already killed two million people. The North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 includes a toll of two million dead in its initial findings.
• Fiona Terry, a researcher for Medicins San Frontieres, has repeatedly published a much higher estimate of 3.5 million between 1995 and 1998 alone. Terry’s figures are based on the extrapolation of known death toll data (or more accurately, “disappearance” data) as reported by refugees. Because some of the disappeared may have survived, and because the estimate might be weighted toward the high side by a geographical skewing of the self-selecting sample toward North Korea’s hardest-hit areas and classes, this figure may well be inflated.
• Marcus Noland, who attempts to adjust for geographic variables, estimates a much lower death toll of between 600,000 and 1 million. I’m not sure that Noland’s figures include mortality from “opportunistic” diseases, however. I’m still reading his book.
• In Chapter Nine of The Great North Korean Famine, Andrew Natsios, now Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, estimates the death toll at between 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 people. Natsios cites several statistically-controlled surveys of North Korean refugees and government population statistics to support his figures, and notes that deaths caused by opportunistic diseases and deaths by migrants who had fallen off census rolls could mean that the true figure is nearer the high end of this range. Interestingly, Natsios notes that local government census figures reflect higher death tolls, despite the fact that food was distributed on a per-person basis.
• The famine continues to starve and permanently stunt millions more to this day. According to a March 2005 WPF press release, North Korea country is still desperately short of food, donations have fallen, and North Korea continues to tighten restrictions on the monitoring of food aid distribution. According to Marcus Noland’s best estimates, 37% of North Korean children under six are stunted, 23% were underweight, and 7% were “wasting,” meaning they were acutely malnourished. Because these estimates include better-fed areas such as Pyongyang, these rates are likely to be much higher in the hungriest areas of North Korea’s northeast. Noland’s figures are very close to WFP figures, which state that 40% of North Korean children are stunted, 20% underweight, and 8% wasting.
• North Korea recently threatened to kick out the aid workers who are feeding its hungriest people. No final word yet on whether that decision was rescinded.
• Accepting the mid-range figure of 2 million North Koreans dead, and accepting the high-end figure of 1,000 dead at Kwangju (even far-lefty NKZone colleague John Feffer–read the reviews–estimates that “several hundreds” died), that means that during the height of the North Korean famine, it amounted to an unmourned Kwangju every day. For. Six. Years. And this disaster wasn’t natural.

If a back-of-the-napkin comparison between North Korea’s food aid needs ($170 million) and its defense budget ($5 billion) and other priorities doesn’t persuade you, consider these sources:

Refugees International:

Members of the “hostile class” and residents of areas deliberately cut off from international food assistance have an especially strong case to be considered refugees in the sense of fleeing targeted political persecution. . . . Not since Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge has a government succeeded in creating such an all-encompassing reality of oppression and restrictions on the basic rights of the majority of its citizens.

Medicins San Frontieres:

Even population groups such as children, pregnant women, and the elderly, who are specifically targeted for assistance by the United Nations World Food Program, are being denied food aid.

More from MSF:

North Korean refugees across the Chinese border spoke of widespread famine, and reported that the authorities had distributed international aid according to social position and party loyalty.

Amnesty International:

The North Korean government should . . . [e]nsure that food shortages are not used as a tool to persecute perceived political opponents and that there is no discrimination in the distribution of food aid.

More on North Korea’s class system here and here, and do get a load of this. So is intentionally starving a whole class of people genocide? Well, technically it isn’t, a fact for which humanity can thank some effective lobbying by Joseph Stalin. As a result, the 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention of Genocide doesn’t cover attempts to exterminate political and social groups. Stalin, as it turns out, wrote the book on dividing his citizens into political classes and then engineering a famine to starve a few million of the least favored ones (on the other hand, “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction” is an enumerated method of genocide).

Here we have a superb and early example of multilateralism at its worst. Under this narrow definition of genocide, Hitler’s attempt to exterminate Germany’s homosexuals doesn’t qualify, either. The law, to the extent we bother to enforce it, is thus a product of the lowest common moral denominator, and that’s a low one indeed.

Somewhere in this, there must be something we can learn that could lives tomorrow. I eagerly await the world’s outrage. Korea’s especially.