THE POLITICS OF FAMINE

By Bruce W. Nelan

Up in the bleak northeastern mountains of North Korea, where there is never much food, people are starving to death in slow motion--alone, abandoned, far from television's electronic eye. Their government cannot help them and does not want the world to witness its shame.

In the comparatively rich southern provinces, we are allowed to catch a glimpse of the truth. There is still something to eat, but barely enough to sustain life for long. Severely malnourished children sit listlessly in nurseries and schools, their bodies stunted, their arms like twigs, folds of skin hanging from rib cages, eyes vacant and staring with hunger. Orphanages are filling up with children whose families can no longer feed them; unwanted newborns never leave the hospital of their birth. The little ones are dangerously vulnerable to diarrhea, pneumonia, measles. Sometimes elderly women collapse, exhausted, by the roadside. Many of the aged are too weak to leave home.

Cadres carrying red flags are still mobilizing workers, children and the military, marching them with buckets--for nothing. People are desperately scrounging for wild grasses, roots, bark--anything to supplement government rations as low as 12 spoonfuls of grain a day. In one village on the eastern coast, a rice-processing mill has no rice, so it is making noodles from seaweed. Every tractor, truck, wagon and ox-cart has been mobilized to distribute food aid as it comes in. Still, the pain is spreading across this country of 24 million as unremitting hunger stalks the land. Li Han, a Chinese truck driver who crosses the frontier regularly at Guchengli, has watched it. "People over there are starving," he says, "in rural areas and in the cities. Even the soldiers are not getting good food."

This is not the sad by-product of war but the miserable result of chronic mismanagement, atrocious policies and three years of terrible luck. Catastrophic flooding over the past two summers swept the Stalinist hermit state to the edge of famine. Now the unending drought and extraordinary heat of 1997 have brought the real thing. Cornfields--at least the ones outsiders can see--are filled with stunted, shriveled plants. Paddy fields that should be blooming are sere and brown. Land normally planted lies barren; hillsides have been stripped of anything edible.

International aid organizations are always alarmist, but they warn that based on their fragmented evidence, 2 million to 5 million people could starve to death. U.N. agencies and independent groups say 70% of this year's corn crop is lost, and half the nation's grain supply consists of corn. Jin Zhe, a shopkeeper in Yanji, a Chinese border city, visited her relatives' village in North Korea three months ago. "No one in the whole village worked," she says. "There was nothing to do, and people were too weak to work."

The world is, as usual, willing to provide humanitarian help, but no one is making it easy. Cruel games are being played on all sides as competing political interests use the famine to their own ends. When it comes to a pariah state like North Korea, there is no such thing as simple humanitarian concern.

Pyongyang is trying to use its citizens' hunger as a bargaining chip, arguing that Washington should deliver massive food aid before the two Koreas, China and the U.S. sit down for serious negotiations to end the state of war that has existed on the Korean peninsula since 1950. The U.S. wants to make sure its aid is not being siphoned off to fatten the diet of North Korea's oversize, 1.1 million-strong army. Proud Northern leaders, who have long preached self-reliance to their citizens, are unwilling to admit even to their own people how dire the situation may be. Congressional conservatives in Washington see Pyongyang's need for food as a lever to impose changes in the country's nuclear, weapons-export and political policies.

The idea of hunger as a political tool turns the stomach of those ready to feed the country's suffering civilians. U.N. agencies estimate the North's needs at 800,000 tons of food aid before October. The North Korean leaders want help but are stubbornly unwilling to do all that is necessary to satisfy nations that would like to pitch in. While they are allowing Western visitors to see hardship in selected areas, their compulsive secrecy keeps them from admitting the immense scope of their failure. Pyongyang opened the door a crack last week to admit a U.S. congressional delegation and a CNN television crew for a controlled glimpse. For the North this was nothing less than a bold public relations blitz, but outsiders could only wonder about all the things they were not permitted to see.

U.S. intelligence experts say they suspect that the regime has already written off some large inland provinces of the mountainous northeast that were hit hardest by drought. Only a few relief workers have been able to get into the region. The analysts believe Pyongyang has adopted a policy of "Malthusian triage," telling provincial leaders there that they are on their own and that no food shipments will be coming.

Such views from Washington might be dismissed as cold war rhetoric if they were not backed up by recent visitors. Florida Republican Porter Goss, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was one of the fact finders in North Korea last week. He got the same chilling message from conversations with officials in Pyongyang. Inland provinces in the northeast, which have been suffering for years, are in effect being quarantined. "They feel that the people who are starving to death there are expendable," Goss told TIME.

North Korean officials also made it clear that the regime would open its totalitarian grip only slightly and that it is prepared to sacrifice lives to keep the society under tight control. Goss says an official told him, "Look, we're not going to beg too hard. We are not going to change and have openness. If those people die, they die."

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called on nations to give the North "all the support we can without making conditions." The U.S. has pledged $52 million in food shipments but refuses to lift its economic sanctions on North Korea. Pyongyang has some ambitious conditions of its own. At preliminary meetings in New York City three weeks ago, the North Koreans tried to sell their participation in formal four-party peace talks for an up-front ante of more food. The U.S. replied that assistance could be covered once talks begin on a treaty to end the Korean War. The North Koreans, who apparently believe in negotiating hard from a position of weakness, countered by demanding that the U.S. first pull its 37,000 troops out of South Korea.

Last week the visiting U.S. congressional group insistently asked for a look at distribution centers delivering U.S. aid, but the Koreans turned them down. Goss and several other angry members warned Foreign Ministry officials that they will introduce legislation to block further aid until Americans can verify where food is going and just how bad the famine really is.

State Department and intelligence officials believe almost all U.S. aid is reaching needy civilians, though they suspect that some food coming from China and the South is being diverted to the military. Seoul, despite its suspicions that the North's army is eating more than its share, began shipping 50,000 tons of food last week but complained about the lack of "transparency" in the distribution process.

Still, imposing completely seamless verification might only push the uncompromising North Koreans into refusing the aid completely. That would do nothing but endanger the lives of thousands of suffering civilians the world would like to help.

--Reported by Jaime A. FlorCruz/Guchengli and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by JAIME A. FLORCRUZ/GUCHENGLI AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON