However good its present harvest, North Korea will remain incapable of feeding itself. At best it has only ever been able to supply 85 percent of its required food. In order to survive, it has relied on supplies from the international community. That aid was instituted after famine in the 1990s when as many as two million North Koreans starved to death. Now tough sanctions have been imposed to punish Pyongyang for its nuclear test and compel it to abandon its atomic weapons program.
South Korea has suspended promised deliveries of half a million tons of wheat. Other food aid is in doubt. Chinese supplies have dropped by a third in the last year. Pyongyang is supposed to have only enough food for the next two months. The UN World Food Program is warning of another humanitarian disaster.
Yet Washington protests the sanctions it pushed through the Security Council are not targeted at ordinary people. They are aimed at the North Korean elite, freezing their bank accounts and depriving them of their many little luxuries. This is a serious distortion of the real consequences of economic sanctions. It is astonishing that memories in Washington are so lamentably short. In the ten years of UN sanctions against Iraq, half a million children died for lack of food or medicine. The Saddam regime tightened its grip on the population and bribed corrupt businessmen and UN officials to circumvent all the restrictions. The Baathist party leadership and their henchmen in the police, army and intelligence services did not suffer the remotest discomfort.
The same will be true of North Korea. The regime will ensure that those who defend it, including its one million-strong army, will be well fed and cared for. It will as usual be the little people who will suffer and suffer cruelly.
Democratic societies may have some residual delusion that a repressed population can only stand so much before it rises up and throws off its tyrants. Tragically there is little comprehension of what it means to live in a police state, where survival comes only from obedience and informing on others. A population weakened by starvation will never rebel. Rather it will obey the more readily in order to receive the few morsels that may stave off death.
And Kim Jong Il’s regime will no doubt use harrowing pictures of its starving masses to loosen international determination to continue sanctions. It probably wants its people to go hungry and thus it limits the humanitarian activities of the World Food Program. There is more. The tougher it gets for the North Korean masses, the greater will seem the regime’s justification for a nuclear armament. And the greater the urgency, Kim and his people will have reasoned correctly that if they had a deliverable nuclear capability now, nobody, not even Washington would even think of kicking them around. Yet equally no one is going to launch a conventional attack on one million North Korean soldiers. Little is certain about this dangerous crisis except that sanctions will achieve nothing except starvation and death for ordinary North Koreans.
