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ASIA
MARCH 29, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 12
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Lambs to the Slaughter
Washington's pact with Pyongyang won't help the starving children
By DONALD KIRK
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Ahn Chol-Renk/AFP
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She looks about six or seven, but tiny Kim Yun is all of 12 years old. And she is one of the lucky ones--a child who has escaped death by slow starvation in North Korea. Now she approaches foreigners, usually tourists from South Korea, as they take photographs from the Chinese side of a bridge across the Tumen River between China and North Korea. Her father died several years ago, probably from starvation, she says. Her sister drowned trying to cross the river. She tries not to think about her mother, now dying slowly of malnutrition. "What's the use?" she asks.
Kim typifies the North Korean children one encounters these days in almost any city or town in northeastern China. Unlike North Korean adults, who prefer to hide for fear of harsh punishment at home, the children count on their eager smiles and heartrending stories to elicit sympathy from local Korean-Chinese, who sometimes offer clothing and shelter. They also embody the bigger questions that nobody seems to hear: What is the world doing to help them and the families they left behind? And why are we dealing with the government that makes them suffer?
The United States and North Korea last week reached a deal under which the North will permit inspections of a cave for signs of nuclear development, in return for several hundred thousand tons of food aid. But will that do anything for these kids? The answer is almost certainly no. The aid may have quite the opposite effect: perpetuating a terrible dictatorship that has executed untold thousands of its people, sent other thousands to prison camps from which death is the only escape and brutalized millions more. The record of deliberate suffering inflicted by North Korean leaders parallels the deaths by starvation and rampant disease caused largely by the regime's rigid self-isolation and economic stupidity.
The government of hereditary leader Kim Jong Il, however, has come up with a terrific gimmick for ensuring a steady supply of food for its 2-million-man military establishment and the privileged class of a few million more deemed loyal enough to share the bounty of Western aid. That is simply to wave the threat of nuclear-weapons development while demanding ever larger payoffs to stop it. Pyongyang followed that policy before agreeing at Geneva in 1994 to stop processing uranium for nuclear warheads. The U.S. had to persuade leaders in Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing to contribute to the construction of nuclear-energy facilities. Washington, meanwhile, is shipping heavy oil to help the North meet its energy needs.
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