Report: Kim Jong-un starves his people, America blamed, women hardest hit

It has now been five years since a U.N. Commission of Inquiry found exhaustive evidence of Pyongyang’s culpability for “crimes against humanity, arising from ‘policies established at the highest level of State,’” including “the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.” It has been less than a year since Human Rights Watch interviewed dozens of witnesses to find that North Korea’s government has built a pervasive culture of rape, where officials prey on women with impunity. But now, a group of apologists for the regime responsible for all of this thinks it’s gotten to the bottom of who is really to blame for the suffering of North Korean women.

As you might expect, they find their culprit in the sanctions that (or so they recently informed us) never work. But other than a fact box on page 4, the study contains no detailed analysis of what the sanctions are. Its most useful sentence of analysis is its acknowledgement that “[t]he nature of UN sanctions against the DPRK started to change fundamentally in November 2016.” This sentence stands out in the report because it is mostly true. Chapter VII UN sanctions weren’t imposed until 2006. And as I’ve pointed out, US sanctions were a nullity before in 2016. Before then, U.S. sanctions were a patchwork of scattered designations of arms dealers and proliferators, and were qualitatively and quantitatively weaker than those against Belarus and Zimbabwe. During the Bush and Obama administrations, they were also largely unenforced.

But this sentence ends up undermining the premise of the report rather than supporting it. Not only does the report fail to cite convincing evidence for a cause-and-effect link between the misery of North Koreans (of either gender) and sanctions, its heavy reliance on pre-2016 data and reports unwittingly implicates the North Korean government policies that both precede and supersede sanctions as a cause of the suffering it cites. An especially egregious omission is its failure to include recent witness accounts to corroborate its conclusions, although these might have risked revealing unwelcome evidence of the greater effects of Pyongyang’s own policies, or the fact that few of the poor report receiving any of the billions of dollars in aid the U.N. and donor nations have given Pyongyang over the last two decades. 

The basis for the new report’s main finding of “gendered” impact? That “[c]ross-national research encompassing 146 countries from 1971 to 2005 shows that international sanctions have a gendered effect.” You see what I mean here? One of the authors, Henri Feron, got himself into trouble in exactly this way before, when he previously pursued the obsolescent narrative that sanctions never work. In a piece for 38North—because of course it was 38North—Feron argued that 2016 sanctions hadn’t affected 2015 construction in Pyongyang (fisked here). When a scholar learns nothing from his past errors, we can only assume that they weren’t inadvertent.

But if the report’s premise is accurate, you’d expect it to cite evidence that these problems worsened since 2016, when sanctions went from minimum to medium pressure. Instead, it cites a chronologically disordered cloud of mostly pre-2016 studies and data–UN reports that cite dubious North Korean government statistics (see notes 16-20), North Korean government reports (!) (see, e.g., notes 103-06), and the pro-Pyongyang “scholar” Suzy Kim (n.102). But by relying on these sources, such as a 2003 U.N. study (note 206, which also appears to rely on Pyongyang’s own claims and statistics) it unwittingly proves that the deprivation of North Koreans isn’t a function of sanctions at all, but a function of the North Korean state policies that both preceded and superseded the only sanctions that have ever had significant effects on North Korea–those imposed in 2016 and 2017.

These policies include, of course, the culpable kleptocracy that diverts most of the state’s resources to weapons and to the life styles of a privileged oligarchy, but also more direct causes. The corruption of the security forces is so great that it’s hard to tell where this ends and the state’s confiscatory taxes on the poorest begin. It enslaves them to build resorts, creating labor shortages that retard food production. It arbitrarily restricts markets and thus, the people’s ability to provide for themselves. When people try to plant their own crops in the hills to feed themselves and those who shop in the markets, the state confiscates the land and crops and replants the fields with trees. These are never mentioned as even contributing causes of all the suffering this report cites. By its narrative, nothing—not even the nuclear drive that necessitates the sanctions to begin with—is Pyongyang’s fault.

The report even fails to cite the best evidence that in two regions, sanctions really are having adverse impacts on  civilians—in coal country in South Pyongan province, and among armaments workers in Chagang. Pyongyang has long used its people as human shields against sanctions—a narrative pushed through reports just like this one. Only, we know that the coal industry is used, in part, to fund Pyongyang’s military, its weapons of mass destruction programs, and its missile production. Yet nowhere does this report so much as obliquely refer to the fact that these programs are increasingly brandished at the U.S., South Korea, and Japan, or employed to lethal effect in Malaysian airports and Syrian villages.  But even if both industries are necessary and legitimate targets for sanctions, these unintended impacts of sanctions are still regrettable. The report might have called for targeted food aid for these regions—and for Pyongyang to stop diverting and obstructing its delivery there—but perhaps that might have drawn too much attention to whose decisions led to the sanctions to begin with.

Or, take the report’s case study on page 29. If it really is factually correct that it took three years for one NGO to get a humanitarian exemption, that’s shameful. It probably speaks to the same inefficiency that’s kept the Treasury Department from closing huge loopholes in Pyongyang’s proliferation financing, including its failure to designate Glocom, Malaysia-Korea Partners, or Shinheung Trading, which helps fund the same internal security service that runs North Korea’s political prison camps. The report might, then, have called on the the U.N.’s 1718 Committee and the Treasury Department to make the exemption procedures work more efficiently, which is also both necessary and legitimate. But this tailored proposal would, of course, distract from the report’s more sweeping objective—its demand, without further specificity, for the lifting of “unilateral coercive” sanctions that “violate international law.” (Spoiler: Pyongyang thinks that’s all of them. That’s what Kim Jong-un demanded at Hanoi, after all.)

No omission in the report is so grievous as its assignment to Pyongyang of the responsibility for absolutely none of this suffering. Scour its recommendations for the most obsequious suggestion for Pyongyang. Or any mention of its defense budget, or what Kim Jong-un rode in for his summits with Mike Pompeo, Moon Jae-in, and Donald Trump. Or where he and Dennis Rodman partied. You’ll find none. The report thus misses every possible opportunity to make a useful recommendation.

And that, in the final judgment, is what distinguishes useful scholarship from propaganda. The former would have recommended more targeted delivery of aid to those areas, speedier U.S. and U.N. action on sanctions exemptions, and—critically—a few pointed recommendations for His Porcine Majesty in Pyongyang, too. Some obvious ones would include a reallocation of his defense budget, an end to Pyongyang’s frustration of monitoring and delivery of aid, an end to the suppression of North Korean markets and private agriculture, and a more sincere diplomatic approach by Pyongyang that accepts, rather than frustrates, meaningful disarmament talks that would eventually make sanctions unnecessary. Instead, we are left with a work of propaganda dressed in spiffy typeface and footnotes, but that is deliberately crafted to mislead rather than to inform.

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