[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 111 (Thursday, July 31, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8487-S8488]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       NORTH KOREAN FAMINE--A HUMAN TRAGEDY AND A THREAT TO PEACE

  Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I rise to address a great human tragedy 
silently unfolding in North Korea and the urgent need for the United 
States to respond.
  The North is experiencing a severe famine and has asked the world for 
help. Pyongyang has gratefully acknowledged our past assistance. It is 
in our interest to respond generously to their plight.


                       on the brink of starvation

  According to experts from the World Food Program [WFP] who recently 
returned from extensive travels in North Korea, tens of thousands of 
people are on the brink of starvation. Hundreds of thousands more are 
suffering from severe malnutrition, the result of several years of 
scarcity.
  The public food distribution system on which 78 percent of the 
North's population depends has effectively ceased to function in most 
parts of the country. In those few rural areas where the public 
distribution system still is operating, rations have fallen to below 
100 grams per day, the equivalent of a small handful or rice or corn 
for each person.
  The evidence of famine is pervasive and undeniable. Children are 
among the hardest hit, their hair tinged red from malnutrition, their 
growth stunted, their eyes sunken and listless.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record 
an article from this week's copy of Newsweek magazine, which includes a 
photograph of starving North Korean children into the Record. I'd like 
to note for the record that a photograph of a Andrew Cunanan graced the 
cover, while the poignant photo of four starving North Korean 
kindergarten students was on page 46.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From Newsweek Magazine, July 28, 1997]

                          Just Skin and Bones

                 (By Tom Masland and Jeffrey Bartholet)

       It's a slow-motion catastrophe, largely hidden from 
     outsiders. But the latest visitors to North Korea confirm the 
     world's worst fears. A nation of 23 million people is 
     starving, slowly and painfully. ``Mere survival is becoming 
     more and more difficult,'' wrote one man to his mother in 
     Japan. ``There are people dying.'' Travelers describe scenes 
     that once were unthinkable in this police state: beggars in 
     the streets of Pyongyang, masked, armed robbers raiding 
     private homes for food, trees totally stripped of leaves and 
     edible bark. Perhaps most persuasive of all are the first 
     photographs to document the deepening tragedy. The one on 
     this page was taken in an orphanage by an official visitor 
     from a Roman Catholic charity. The blank stares of the 
     spindly infants cry out: time is short.
       In response to the crisis, Washington last week doubled its 
     previous donation of food aid to the north. The promised 
     100,000 tons of grain represents slightly more than half the 
     $45.6 million requested by the World Food Program earlier 
     this month in direct response to the plight of North Korea's 
     children. Executive director Catherine Bertini says the WFP 
     needs enriched baby food for children who are too 
     malnourished to digest the customary relief meal, a handful 
     of ground corn. Bertini reports that the program's staff 
     members in North Korea ``estimate that 50 to 80 percent of 
     the children they have seen in nurseries are underweight and 
     markedly smaller than they should be for their age. They are 
     literally wasting away.''
       Playing politics: The emergency food aid will help, but 
     it's not a lasting answer to North Korea's creeping famine. 
     The crisis is bound up with politics: North Koreans are going 
     hungry because their Stalinist economy is collapsing, and the 
     United States, Tokyo and Seoul are using food aid to lure 
     Pyongyang into four-way peace talks and economic reform. Yet 
     North Korean leader Kim Jong II and his cronies are wary of 
     any compromise that could loosen their grip on power. They're 
     prepared to do whatever they feel is necessary to survive--
     and they're wildly unpredictable.
       Managing North Korea's collapse has become a top priority 
     of the Clinton administration. The United States has 37,000 
     troops based in South Korea to help deter Pyongyang. Yet as 
     North Korea deteriorates, fears mount that its leaders will 
     ``use it before they lose it.'' The endgame is no longer a 
     matter of if, but when. As a Rand Corporation study concluded 
     last year, ``The Korean Peninsula presents a strange paradox. 
     Nobody knows what might happen this year or next, but 
     everyone agrees on how things will look in 10 or 20 years. 
     The North Korean regime is doomed in the long run.''
       In part to obtain famine relief, Pyongyang last month 
     finally agreed to attend peace talks in New York aimed at 
     ending the formal state of war that still applies on the 
     peninsula. And last week North Korea promised to lift a ban 
     that has prevented Japanese wives of North Koreans from 
     visiting their homeland for more than three decades. Japan, 
     which has vast stocks of surplus rice, now is considering 
     providing additional food aid. But anyone who thought 
     Pyongyang was turning soft got a rude reminder last week. A 
     squad of North Korean troops briefly crossed the 
     demilitarized zone and provoked the heaviest exchange of fire 
     with South Korean troops in two decades.
       Why increase tensions along the most heavily armed border 
     in the world? Pyongyang may believe that by instigating a 
     fire fight along the border it reinforces the message that 
     North Korea is dangerously unstable--springing loose more 
     food aid from Washington, Japan and others. Some analysts 
     also think that there's a power struggle underway within the 
     regime between hardliners in the military and moderates in 
     the civilian bureaucracy. According to this view, every time 
     the moderates move to open relations with the outside world, 
     hard-liners resist. Last September the incursion of a North 
     Korean submarine on the South Korean coast led to a manhunt 
     in which 24 North Koreans and 13 South Koreans were killed--
     just as Pyongyang was trying to persuade foreign businesses 
     to invest in a new free-trade zone. This time, hard-liners 
     may have wanted to pre-empt the Aug. 5 peace talks.
       Once sanguine about a ``soft landing'' in Korea--in which 
     Pyongyang embraces economic reforms and gradual, peaceful 
     reunification--U.S. intelligence analysts now predict a 
     crash. In one scenario, reformers topple Kim in a palace coup 
     and call for help from Seoul or Beijing--creating yet another 
     delicate, hard-to-manage issue between Beijing and 
     Washington. Or perhaps North Korea attempts to seize Seoul, 
     hoping to achieve reunification on its own terms. One former 
     Pentagon analyst warns of a human-wave assault down high 
     ridges and hills where tanks can't operate. This would likely 
     come during the summer, when chemical weapons work most 
     effectively and haze hinders air operations. The argument 
     against such a disaster: China, North Korea's neighbor and 
     longtime socialist ally, can be expected to use all its 
     influence to deter such an attack.
       Could famine bring on the collapse of the Pyongyang regime? 
     Conceivably, if North Koreans come to fear starvation more 
     than they do the government. But so far discipline remains 
     strong. U.S. Rep. Tony Hall, who visited the North in April, 
     recalls visiting a maternity clinic where mothers were dying 
     and 6-month-old infants looked like newborns. ``If you asked 
     what they planned to do, people answered, `The Dear Leader 
     will take care of us. He always does'.'' Hall said. Whoever 
     eventually rules a united Korean peninsula could pay the 
     price for years. ``This is one of the few countries I know 
     where the kids are growing up to be smaller than their 
     parents,'' says Hall. Some call it ``generational stunting.'' 
     ``If [children] are malnourished in these critical years, 
     they can't make it up,'' says one U.N. official. For North 
     Korea's hungry kids, the endgame is now.


                        inadequate U.S. response

  Mr. BIDEN. The United States has a long tradition of responding 
generously to people in need. By sharing our bounty we have saved 
millions in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Angola.
  To date, however, our response to North Korea's famine has been 
cautious and inadequate.
  Over the past 12 months, the United States has provided a total of 
about $60 million in food aid, including the recent announcement of 
$27.4 million for 100,000 metric tons of grain.
  The world, following our restrained lead, has been slow to meet the 
genuine emergency needs of the North Korean people. According to the 
World Food Program, the North began 1997 roughly 2 million tons of 
grain short of what it would need to avoid famine. But as of July 1, 
the North had received a total of only about 423,000 tons of food aid, 
It had managed to purchase or barter another 330,000 tons, leaving a 
shortfall of more than 1 million tons for the remainder of the calendar 
year.
  The United States has never linked politics with emergency food 
assistance, and we should not do so now.
  We can do more.
  And we should do more to avert mass starvation and the incumbent risk 
of political and military instability of the Korean peninsula.

[[Page S8488]]

                            roots of famine

  Why is the North experiencing a famine? North Korean authorities 
attribute the shortages to a string of bad weather, including serious 
flooding in 1995 and 1996. Truth be told, however, the famine is 
largely the result of wrong-headed, discredited Communist economic 
policies and the devotion of vast resources to the North Korean armed 
forces.
  But this does not make the North Korean people less deserving of 
emergency relief. It is not ethically permissible to use starvation as 
a weapon to force the North Korean dictatorship to undertake essential 
economic reforms.
  Some observers worry that the North might divert our food aid from 
those who are truly hungry to the military or party elite.
  But international relief agencies are able to send their monitors 
through-out the famine-stricken areas where supplies are being 
delivered. The World Food Program has even chartered a helicopter to 
facilitate oversight.
  United States private voluntary organizations will soon begin 
directly supervising the distribution of American assistance, opening 
another window into life inside the hermit kingdom.
  The bottom line? We can have a high degree of confidence that the 
vast majority of any assistance we provide will reach the intended 
targets.


                        why not starve them out?

  Opponents of emergency famine relief for North Korea wonder aloud 
whether the famine might not be a blessing in disguise; the perfect 
mechanism to bring about the downfall of one of the most repressive 
regimes left on the planet. But this cynical view is not only immoral, 
it displays a total disregard for the potentially explosive results of 
such a policy of strangulation.
  Famines are profoundly restabilizing events. No one can predict with 
confidence how North Korea might respond. But it is obvious to me that 
we do not want the North--which may possess one or two nuclear 
weapons--to experience panic, massive population migrations, and 
instability.
  In testimony earlier this month before the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee, Andrew Natsios, director of foreign disaster assistance 
during the Bush administration and now vice-president of World Vision, 
a nongovernmental relief organization operating in North Korea, warned 
that the North's famine could soon reach the irreversible stage.
  He added that by the time the world sees CNN broadcasts or emaciated 
North Korean children too weak to lift themselves off their cots, it 
will be too late to save them.


                             food for peace

  Next Tuesday, August 5, representatives of North Korea, South Korea, 
China, and the United States are scheduled to convene talks aimed at 
replacing the tattered 1953 Armistice with a peace treaty. If history 
is any guide, these historic negotiations are likely to be both 
difficult and protracted.
  But while the diplomats talk and the world waits and prays for peace, 
famished innocent North Koreans move closer to death.
  It is time for the United States to lead a comprehensive, humane 
response to the North's famine.
  Not because the North has agreed to peace talks;
  Not because the North has frozen its nuclear program and accepted 
international atomic energy agency monitoring of its Yongbyon nuclear 
facility; and
  Not because the North is cooperating for the first time in 50 years 
in the search for the remains of America's 8,000 missing servicemen 
from the Korean war.
  We should respond because it is the smart thing to do. It is the 
noble thing to do. It is an expression of all that is best about 
America that cannot help but resonate in the hearts of the North Korean 
people.

                          ____________________