Category: Personal

It’s happening again.

When I was in South Korea, a statistic came out that in 2000, South Koreans threw away more food than North Korea ate. This was perhaps a sign of profligacy on the South’s part, but it was also a sign that the North was starving.

Now, after a couple of years of relative plenty, meaning bare subsistance for many, North Korea is again slipping into famine. To see what this means in human terms, click here, here and here. (Warning: the images are deeply disturbing.)

The return of famine is sure to be a subject of discussion in renewed talks with South Korea — talks that mark the first meaningful progress with North Korea since the last round of the Six-Party Talks broke off last June. And it highlights the sickening evil of the North Korean regime, which cannot find the means to feed its people but nevertheless goes on spending precious resources and political capital on nuclear weapons.

It reminds me of a cartoon I saw after India tested its nukes: it showed a giant missile being pulled by a donkey cart. But while some 450 million Indians were said to be malnourished at the time, India at least has not had a major famine since independence. And its nuclear program was a major plank in the platform of a democratically elected government. Even so, India’s fear mongering and its gigantic waste of resources on nuclear weapons and on soldiers to defend Kashmir are deeply shameful.

How much more so, then, for North Korea, which seems intent on defending its people to the death.

Enough.

A couple of years ago, getting ourselves set up again in New York after a couple of years out of it, we took the first apartment we were shown, a one-bedroom with den and garden for the ridiculously low price (for Carroll Gardens) of $1,100 a month. The catch? It was next to the Gowanus Houses projects. But we walked through the projects and they looked tidy enough, so in we moved.

The strangeness of our little pocket of the neighborhood took a while to register. After all, just three blocks up is the Boerum Hill Historic District, while two blocks to the west is stylish Smith Street, and this is the neighborhood we thought we were moving into. But we were in Gowanus (click for great pictures of the area), the light-industrial fringe, with a parking lot across the street, a garbage truck repair station up the block, and mysterious semi-derelict lots all up and down Bond Street. Bass throbs at all hours from the car stereos of people who like to park in front of the projects, or the C-Town around the corner, or the couple of other apartment buildings on the block. The sidewalks were broken when we moved in and have stayed that way despite a couple of years of calls to the city. A cobbled-together building across the street is graced with rooftop speakers that point at our building and blast Spanish radio. We once found a syringe in a trash heap next to our building, and I think I saw a neighbor pull a gun once.

This might all have been bearable if our apartment were in better condition. But we haven’t got enough electricity to run two air conditioners at once, there are often hot water shortages, we had a major mouse infestation, for a while our ceilings were leaking regularly, and our entryway has been under renovations since we moved in, with the only signs of progress in two years being the replacement of four rotting stairs and the piling up of successively more of our super’s junk. The apartment is drafty, and the landlord won’t keep the heat on in early fall or late spring, as is required by New York law. Our backyard has a mysterious pile of debris at the back and an infinite supply of broken glass embedded in the soil.

Two years and a few pay raises later, the time has come for us to move. We don’t plan to go far. We want to live in Carroll Gardens, just like we did two years ago when we rented this place. And we want a dishwasher. We’re hoping to get all this at the end of July. Wish us luck.

Ever wonder what it’s like to grow up in North Korea?

When Jenny and I were in South Korea, we got a kick out of a curious TV show called Peninsula Scope, a half-hour news magazine about North Korea broadcast on Arirang, South Korea’s government-sponsored English-language TV channel. This was, of course, a dicey affair. The show was established during a thaw between the two Koreas, so it bent over backward to find nice things to say, remaining relentlessly upbeat about reconciliation and reunification even as the political situation worsened. (The show was cancelled at the end of 2004.) But it couldn’t be too nice, because South Korea’s harsh Security Law remains in force, threatening “Up to 7 years in prison for those who praise, encourage, disseminate or cooperate with anti-state groups [read: North Korea], members or those under their control [read: North Koreans].”

But by far the best part of Peninsula Scope came at the end of each episode, when they would show a North Korean cartoon. They’re not good exactly, but they’re fascinatingly weird. You can check them out at Peninsula Scope’s video on demand page (free registration required). They’re definitely worth a look.

According to the lede in today’s Times, China has ruled out using economic sanctions against North Korea to pressure it to return to the six-party talks. This means that the one really viable tool the US might have had against North Korea is off the table.

As the article continues, though, it suggests that pretty much every part of the current situation is ambiguous. Are the North Koreans planning to test a nuclear weapon? No one is sure what the satellite pictures indicate, nor whether the North Koreans are bluffing. Has China really ruled out cuts to its oil and food shipments to North Korea, which are pretty much all that is keeping the regime afloat? Some officials think the Chinese may be making sanguine statements in public but privately telling the North Koreans a different story. What does it all mean? No one knows.

I can understand China’s position. They’ve already got a problematic trickle of refugees coming across their border with North Korea, and a regime collapse could turn that into a massive wave. Nor is China entirely certain of its own ethnic Koreans living in Manchuria, whom the Chinese fear could develop separatist ambitions. For China, nail-biting stability is perhaps preferable to the chaos that might be triggered if the North Korean regime is substantially weakened.

Still, if China is unwilling to cut off supplies, then there is essentially nothing the rest of the world can do with North Korea except wait and cajole, or else go to war. So far, fortunately, no one seems to be leaning toward the latter option, which would be disastrous on a scale the West hasn’t had to deal with since the Second World War.

So it looks like North Korea is getting ready for a nuclear test, and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, is now warning of serious consequences if North Korea goes ahead with the test.

What, I wondered, might those consequences be? I went and asked one of my colleagues about the situation, and he said that a nuclear test would probably lead to “discussion” of North Korea in the Security Council, possibly leading to sanctions.

Oh.

The good in this is that no one seems to be talking about launching military strikes against North Korea, as people do rather casually about Iran. Any military action against North Korea can be expected to trigger massive retaliation against South Korea, not to mention Japan and possibly even China, all of whose capitals are within range of North Korea’s missiles. As such, the only conceivable justification for an attack on North Korea would be a North Korean attack on someone else. This is a nightmare scenario to be avoided by pretty much any means possible.

Short of war, then, what can the world do? Talk tough and impose sanctions. North Korea doesn’t have much to lose economically — it’s hard to get much poorer than starving — but it does rely on China for fuel, and without that, it’s not clear how long the regime could keep going. That’s something that could actually scare Pyongyang. The problem, of course, is that no one knows what happens next if the regime does indeed collapse.

The best hope for all involved is that the threat of sanctions brings North Korea back to the negotiating table, and that indeed may be what all this fuss is about in the first place. At the same time that it’s preparing for a nuclear test, North Korea is also saying it would like to talk. Kim Jong-il seems to enjoy escalating crises before stepping back, so we’ll see.

My colleague told me that June is the critical month, because June will mark one year since the North Koreans pulled out of the Six-Party Talks. So if there is no nuclear test now, watch to see what happens then.

More on the subject of educational experiments in the developing world: BBC News has a photo essay on Barefoot College, which teaches basic skills and provides basic services to poor Indians in rural villages. Favorite quote:

Bhanwar Gopal, an artist from the Barefoot College, prepares masks for plays and puppet shows with material from recycled World Bank reports.

“We keep getting these reports that no one reads, so we decided to put them to some use,” Mr Roy says.

Learn more here.

Fred Kaplan at Slate provides a useful summary of the issues at stake at the NPT Review Conference currently taking place in New York. His perspectives, furthermore, are quite similar to my own, and they’re in line with South Korea’s approach as well, although some of the more exotic suggestions — an anti-proliferation expeditionary force, for example — are no one’s stated policy, and I would have to think seriously about them before deciding they made sense.

Hopefully Ambassador Kim’s Deputy Minister Chun Yung-woo’s statement at the coference, which I worked on in its early stages, will be up on the Korean Mission website soon.

Update: The speech is now available here.

Korea by night.

Christopher Hitchens argues in Slate that North Korea is a slave state, worse than the dystopia of Orwell’s 1984, where the entire population is not only enslaved but starving.

Hitchens concludes with a set of recommendations:

It seems to me imperative that the human rights movement, hitherto unpardonably tongue-tied about all this, should insistently take up the case of North Korea and demand that an underground railway, or perhaps even an overground one, be established. Any Korean slave who can get out should be welcomed, fed, protected, and assisted to move to South Korea. Other countries, including our own, should announce that they will take specified numbers of refugees, in case the current steady trickle should suddenly become an inundation.

I think he’s on the right track. We may not have a solution to the North Korea problem immediately at hand, any more than we had a solution to the Soviet problem in the 1980s, but the policy then of highlighting human rights abuses, shaming the Soviets and supporting dissidents was morally and tactically the right one, and the same should be true for North Korea today.