Christian Groups Claim to Smuggle Food Into North Korea
Does anyone know anything about these people, and are they legit?
I know some of you think I’ve been tough on Robert Park, but when I compare what he did to what these people are doing, there’s simply no comparing the relative capacity of the two techniques to change lives and minds. Even to plenty of us non-believers, things like this are so admirable that they’ve persuaded me that Christianity will be Kim Jong Il’s undoing and North Korea’s rebirth. People very seldom take risks like this for strangers without the belief in a higher power and the selfless cohesion to a group that those beliefs can inspire. Good for them. I wonder how many lives they’ll save.
I’ve done a great deal of thinking and writing about the topic of smuggling over the last few days, especially food smuggling, but more on that later.
This is an excerpt from a Denver’s “Solid Rock Community Church.†I think it is a Korean-American Church.
(URL: http://www.kcmusa.org/center/church.php?idx=6257&view=3)
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It says Alpha Relief Foundation had presentation in Colorado Springs on Apr. 4(, 2008.) This organization sponsors Underground Food Aid. It goes on to say that its worshippers attended it and made donations.
Christians are doing lot more than we know, IMHO. I believe their claim that they set up rather sizable underground network inside N. Korea. Communists’ real enemy is not capitalism but an active religion.
Alpha Food Aid is a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a very high level, transparent first class organization for auditing and rating Evangelical organizational financial dealings. That is as legit as it gets (as far as the money trail).
Do not underestimate the level of interdenominational and cross cultural cooperation that exists in the underground railroad. These are intrepid true believers with a shared faith and a shared goal: the rescue of persecuted North Koreans, especially fellow Christians.
I have knowledge that many Catholics are also involved in transborder activity on behalf of the NKs but choose a very low profile for a variety of reasons. My family and my religious congregation support Catholic Sisters who take care of badly abused defectors who successfully retrograde to the ROK. The defectors were shown the excellent movie The Crossing and said it was too soft on the DPRK (!). These nuns are doing the Lord’s work.
Robert Park and the Alpha Group are not to be contrasted as opposites; they are two sides of the same coin. Robert Park is igniting a Spartacus movement – and more Spartacai may follow soon. Park is the inspiration for the kind of missionary activity Alpha Group is undertaking.
I find it personally gratifying to hear this from your keyboard on OFK:
Moses was viewed as looney when he advanced into the heart of Pharaoh’s court with this message: “Thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel; let my people go that they may sacrifice to me.”
The God of Israel is inspiring these believers just as he did Moses and Joshua 4,000 years ago.
Blessings,
KCJ
The second video is by Heaven’s Family, and they have this to say about their work (full disclosure: I am a donor):
These folks target the feeding of starving NK Christians. This also from their website:
Flavius Josephus recorded similar events just before Jerusalem fell to Titus in 70 AD, which I would assume you are familiar with Joshua.
I cannot speak about the legitimacy of these groups but I am certainly hopeful that they are.
I and others have been supporting another organization that brings food and medicine into North Korea. They do not smuggle this though, they bring it in legitimately through networks and are open about their Christian faith. Unfortunately I cannot name the organization publicly but I know the head of it personally and am amazed by his courage and faith.
A Korean man I know, who is a priest, told me he was allowed by NK authorities to go to NK to hand out food to starving NKoreans as part of a group of priests. He gave them rice, potatoes, seeds (so they could grow it), cooking equipment, and candy. However, the NK officials (who were with him the whole time) took the candy back and gave it to the SKorean man I know because the NKoreans’ “pride would be hurt.” He said it was quite obvious that the NKoreans wanted the candy but none of them could speak up. Then at the end of the trip, as he was about to go back onto the bus, he secretly threw all the candy on the road and fields for the NKoreans to find. He wasn’t caught, thank God, and I do hope they got the candy.
He also told me that he wasn’t to speak to the NKoreans because his accent would give him away as a southerner, and NKoreans knowing that they were getting food from SKoreans would, again, “hurt their pride.”
Not to downplay the courage of these people, but wondering if the approach Frank mentioned is a lot more effective, both from a humanitarian and proselytzing POV. For churches (and other foreign organizations) that operate within North Korea legitimately, they have permanent operations that provide some of the basic social services that the regime fails to: food, shelter, and even healthcare. And this on a consistent and more sustainable basis, from a financial, welfare, and legal perspective. In fact, I’d even go as far as argue that this “beachhead” strategy is the most long-sighted one that anybody has drawn up when it comes to the DPRK. The big con in this is that human rights cannot be part of the agenda and it may look like a form of regime accomodation – but I would say that everyone has a different part to play in opening up and changing North Korea.
From a proselytizing POV, this is the exact approach that missionaries arriving in Korea during the late 19th century took. And look how the Yonsei’s, the Ehwa’s, and the Severance Hospitals of Korea did for themselves. Not too shabby.
Jack, The essence of the problem is knowing who is eating the food. If you donate the food through the regime, you know most of it’s going to be stolen or diverted out on a discriminatory basis. I’d be OK with Frank’s approach to the extent the donors coopt or bribe the people who distribute the food, but frankly, I have doubts about that approach based on an acquaintance who was involved in exactly such an effort for years, before that person’s group concluded that the military was diverting everything. I also suspect that this group was kicked out of North Korea last spring, as all U.S. NGO’s involved in food aid supposedly were.
On the other hand, I think the long-term approach of consistently providing essential services to fixed groups of citizens is very important. To measure the effectiveness of food aid, there is simply no substitute for a long-term nutritional survey — really, the ultimate tool for monitoring. For obvious reasons, the regime doesn’t allow nutritional surveys. I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to do that is clandestinely. After all, what else can you do with a regime that, when it lets in food aid at all, balks at monitoring? That’s all I’m going to say for now, because I have a very long piece on this that’s almost ready for publication.
Joshua – the question is, how much is being stolen or diverted? And if it’s diverted, who is it going to be diverted to? Even if 25% of it is being diverted (the high end that Haggard and Noland estimate) that’s still 75% of it that’s going to the right people. And even if some of that 25% is being diverted into the private markets (as Haggard and Noland suggest), that’s a lot more ammunition fueling the very institution that the regime possibly finds the most disturbing to its survival (well, apart from Christianity).
It seems we have different anecdotal experiences – the Canadian folks I’ve talked to are quite optimistic that their services (for instance, baked bread and noodles) are being consumed by the right people (namely because they’re distributing processed products that can’t be easily diverted and their products are on the subsistence level, something the military would never even touch, nor sell) Furthermore, I find that the longer the NGO/int’l organization stays in North Korea, and the more persistent it is, the more likely it will be able to make progress in reporting/access. Both the WFP and private enterprise folks who have been in North Korea tell me that that they’ve seen increased access over the years, even to districts that were previously restricted in the past. Are they going to get 100% access – probably not. But at least it’s access – from what I hear, it’s far from the “shut down” scenario that was happening back in the 1990’s.