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TIME magazine is reporting that another massive famine is approaching North Korea once again:
Now, partly because of the diplomatic gridlock, a new crisis is looming. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) recently warned that North Korea, a country where U.N. agencies estimate that more than a third of young children are chronically malnourished, could be on the brink of another deadly food shortage. Food aid has propped up the North since the mid-1990s, when famine killed between 1 million and 3 million people. But major contributors, including the U.S. and Japan, are reluctant to keep feeding North Korea while Kim refuses to relinquish his nuclear arsenal. The WFP is trying to provide for 6.5 million people in the country, says Richard Ragan, head of the WFP’s relief operation in North Korea. But donations from governments have withered by more than half since 2002, and the agency will be forced to halt food supplies to nearly 3.6 million people this month, Ragan tells TIME by phone from Pyongyang. “We are inching back toward the precipice,” he says.
Now the big decision for the US is to decide if it should stop or increase food aid to deal with the upcoming famine:
Washington insists it won’t use humanitarian aid as a stick to prod Pyongyang back to the negotiating table. “The President has always made clear that food shouldn’t be used as a diplomatic weapon,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan last week. The U.S. sent more than 500,000 tons of food aid in 1999, but last year it pledged just 50,000 tons, and has yet to promise any new food aid this year. (U.S. officials complain that Pyongyang still isn’t allowing adequate international monitoring to ensure food goes to the needy.)
That last sentence is what I find to be a key statement. I don’t think we should send any food aid to the North if it isn’t properly monitored. Ideally I would prefer to have a US agency monitoring the distribution of food aid, plus every bag or can of food given to the needy should have a US flag on it to show where it came from. It is very unlikely that a US agency would be allowed to monitor food aid so it would probably have to be the UN’s World Food Program. However, I wouldn’t send any aid until US monitors are allowed to go with the UN officials to distribute aid.
I don’t see the point of sending food aid under the current distribution system if it all just goes to Pyongyang and the North Korean Army anyway. Those are the people we want to have starve. When the elites go hungry that is when change will happen and as long as the food aid is not properly monitored the ruling elite will horde the food for themselves while the people who need it in the countryside starve. It appears even South Korea is getting sick of sending food to the elites:
Meanwhile, South Korea, too, has been stingier with the North of late. Seoul shipped 1.2 million tons of rice to Pyongyang over the last three years, plus another 300,000 tons of corn through the WFP. This year, it hasn’t sent anything.
I wonder what would happen if we instead of bombing North Korean nuclear facilities we instead bombed them with MRE’s (military rations) much like we did for the people in Afghanistan? How would the average North Korean citizen react to their government trying to shoot down planes delivering food aid to them while they are starving? North Korea also wouldn’t have any support from China if they wanted to start a war over an MRE bombing campaign. Plus the country couldn’t mobilize it’s citizens for a people’s war if all the people are starving and then the government decides to go to war over MRE’s. Sometimes I find it better to think outside the box because the current box everyone else is thinking in hasn’t solved anything.
2:41 am on January 7th, 2007 1
If I recall the reporting at the time correctly, the airdropped MRE's weren't all that popular with the Afghans who found them. And this method was seen as extraordinarily inefficient, considering the cost of the MRE's and the need to draw down military reserves of MRE's in order to supply enough. It was only considered as a "success" in its public relations aspect.
And remember we only did these airdrops after every possible Taliban/Al Queda air defense site had been thoroughly suppressed by combat aircraft attacks. Even then the airdrops were only done at night and at very high altitude which tended to scatter the drops; some of them ended up far from where they were intended to go. I suspect even now that Afghan and US troops patrolling in remote areas may still be finding weathered crates of old MRE's.
Are you seriously suggesting that US military transports make unannounced airdrop missions over North Korea? My goodness, I hope the pilots would have the good sense to refuse to obey such an order and ask for a court-martial instead; obeying it would mean certain death.
NorK would automatically shoot them down and then claim the were bombers, while refusing the world press access to the wreckage. NorK AA defenses and defensive fighter acft are going to be a lot more proficient than Iraq's and certainly the Taliban's were (and even then we only did these at night).
And the North isn't going to give permission for US military overflights no matter how many of their people are starving.
2:41 am on January 7th, 2007 2
I'm just saying it could be something to be looked at to judge the feasability of it. I'm not in the Air Force so I don't know how high they can fly to conduct an air drop but in Iraq they had air defense batteries literally everywhere and they still couldn't hit anything. Even if the food landed in the country side the Koreans are hungry enough they will find it. North Korea is no where near as large as Afghanistan which has a similar population size as North Korea.
But the main point of the post is that we shouldn't just give them unmonitored food.
2:41 am on January 7th, 2007 3
AF transports are big fat targets to any type of decent air defense (which means anything that has integrated radar systems and where the gunners and missile crews are not all asleep).
If you're airborne you'll know that in order to hit a DZ with a high accuracy rate (whether with troops or equipment) the AF has got to go in low and slow (2500 feet or less); airborne forces simply can't be dropped into a well defended area in this modern era. Even in WWII we lost a lot of them before they ever hit the ground and got out of their parachutes.
And having a small country to drop in works both ways. Even if the NK air defenses were completely asleep, North Korean troops would immediately be deployed into the DZ area and confiscate all the rations from the ground. Any NK citizens who had gotten to the dropped crates to gather up an armful, and then was later found with them, would be shot on the spot, or shipped off to prison camp.
The "public relations" solution would be to send in some civilian freighter ships loaded with foodstuffs, UN rep food monitors, and world press with TV cameras and satellite uplinks, for live continuous broadcast. Maybe even trucks on "roll on roll off" ships, already uploaded with the grain. The NorK customs/ coast guard/ border guard troops could be confronted with demands from the food monitors to let the trucks drive off immediately from the docks to the famine areas. Announce the whole thing ahead of time, so the whole world is watching the satellite feed as the ships cross into NorK territorial waters and enter the harbors for docking (might be a problem getting ship pilots, the NorK's would probably not send any out to meet the incoming ships).
The key would be to find brave "monitors" and "world press" (also ships' crews, who would have to receive quadruple overtime). And I doubt if you could find any of these in enough quantity; there's plenty of phony moral heroes ready to go to Iraq to be "human shields" against a US bombing campaign, but when it's a matter of sailing a ship loaded with food into a hostile NorK harbor, 99% of them will say "No thanks, that's not my job".
Since deep down inside these folks know there's an extremely good chance the NorK defenses would attack the ship and maybe sink it, or maybe board it and throw everyone into the gulag once it crossed into NorK territorial waters.
Probably the world (and the ROK) will get upset at the US when the starvation gets bad, and we will relent as we usually do and beg the North to allow us to ship in food under whatever conditions they dictate. I hope not; I feel for the Korean citizens dying of starvation but as far as I'm concerned we're still at war and only a temporary armistice prevails.
You know how this whole situation frustrates me. If the ROK wants to feed the north, and wants us to do so as well, I say fine. Let's go to Panmunjon, agree on a peace treaty, sign it, and get the hell out. Then we can ship the North whatever the ROK wants, I'll be happy to endorse whatever US tax monies are needed to pay for the grain. This "half-war half peace" serves only to make it easy for politicians to keep from having to make the hard choices.
54 years later the essential question posed by MacArthur to Truman (which he did improperly and got himself justly fired for) still remains unanswered. You can't (or rather, you shouldn't) ask soldiers to risk their lives for some "twilight zone" of half-war / half-peace.