North Korea's `Stay-At-Home' Famine

IT'S not the usual picture of famine. In fact, there are precious few pictures.

Those images that do make it out of North Korea present a "stay-at-home" famine, where people survive as best they can: mixing gruel from ground bark, eating pets and wild grasses, and making do on an average of 100 grams of rice a day - one-quarter of the minimum needed to sustain life.

It is a place where the elderly are too weak to leave their homes because they've given up their food to keep their grandchildren alive.

Many of North Korea's 23 million people are facing starvation. And many people in Washington State and throughout the United States aren't aware of it.

Americans aren't aware because, unlike the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s, they don't see images of starving children on the evening news or in their newspapers. This story is not "news" because North Korea is a closed society - a Stalinist regime - that is off limits to the cameras of Western journalists.

Moreover, if cameras were allowed into North Korea, they would not find mass famine camps filled with sick, starving, dying people who have fled their homes in search of food. North Korea's repressive regime and centralized food distribution system - which insures that nearly everyone receives an equal, though hopelessly inadequate food ration - have made this a stay-at-home famine. There are no naked, stick-like figures of starving children. Children are fully clothed in North Korea's cool climate. It's only when you pull back their sleeves that you see the tell-tale signs of acute malnutrition: thin arms and skin rashes.

Humanitarian aid groups are committed to helping save lives in Communist North Korea, regardless of political concerns. World Vision, a worldwide Christian relief and development agency founded 47 years ago to help needy Koreans, believes that no child of God should be allowed to die needlessly. We would like our leaders in Washington to share our concerns for and our commitment toward these oppressed and starving people.

The United States is failing to exercise its role as a world leader in responding to famine in North Korea. Beyond the hype of press releases and sound bites, America's $25 million donation is less than 7 percent of what is needed to feed the people of North Korea.

Countless children - as well as the sick and the elderly - are being forgotten by those who oppose responding to urgent food needs in North Korea. These opponents argue that the world can force the North Korean government, the government against which 33,651 Americans lost their lives in the Korean War, into sitting down at the negotiating table with South Korea by using food aid as an incentive.

Their argument is indefensible - ethically and morally. All famines are complicated by politics; no famine this century has occurred in a democracy. However, the motives of a country's leaders should be immaterial: We must decide to help starving children and their grandparents because the United States is a good country, not because it believes North Korea is good or bad. To do otherwise diminishes America's own moral standing.

During the 1980s, when Ethiopia was facing massive starvation, President Ronald Reagan instituted a policy: "A hungry child knows no politics." Famine relief given by the United States government should not be precluded because we find a particular government offensive. This policy was followed in Ethiopia as well as Sudan, Iraq, Angola and elsewhere. Not only were millions of lives saved, but - at least in the cases of Ethiopia and Angola - the stage was set for peace and better relations with the United States.

It is unfortunate the "hungry child" doctrine has been abandoned in the case of North Korea, where floods combined with systemic collapse in the agricultural sector have created desperate food shortages. While claiming to have responded to humanitarian appeals, the Clinton administration's contribution has been minimal - just enough to feed North Korea's 23 million people for a little more than a week.

People find ways of surviving the first year of a famine; it is in the second year that they die: first, very young children, followed by pregnant women and nursing mothers, and then, the sick and the elderly. In North Korea, we likely will see a different order as the elderly sacrifice themselves for their grandchildren. They are the ones who remember brothers and sisters, cousins and friends in South Korea. Surely their deaths will diminish chances for reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula.

Children, old people, the sick and pregnant women will die first because physically, they are the most vulnerable.

Politically, they also are the most powerless.

North Korea reluctantly is looking for help from the West. If President Clinton does not feel compelled to respond, maybe congressional leaders, including Sens. Slade Gorton and Patty Murray, could help him understand the severity of the problem. Call Sen. Gorton's office in Bellevue at 425-451-0103 or Sen. Murray's office in Seattle at 206-553-5545 and urge them to contact the president about helping feed people starving half a world away. You may also want to write to President Clinton at the White House and Speaker Newt Gingrich in Congress.

What price tag do we put on a human life? A hungry child may know no politics, but if the United States fails to lead, it will demonstrate the value it puts on political concerns.

Sally Leist is a representative of World Vision U.S., a Christian humanitarian aid organization serving more than 50 million people in 103 countries, including North Korea.