Human Rights and Humanitarian Assistance in North Korea: Past, Present and Future

The backdrop for this presentation was North Korea's decision to shift the focus of its relationship with the international donor community from humanitarian to development assistance. To effect this change, the international NGOs that had been supplying the country with emergency food aid since the crisis of the mid-1990s, including most notably the World Food Program, were ordered to wind up their programs and to leave the country by the end of the year. Many observers viewed this decision with alarm and some leading analysts even characterized it as another confirmation of North Korea's capricious decision making and egregious lack of concern for the well being of its people. Stephen Linton, chairman of the Eugene Bell Foundation, offered a more textured perspective based on his extensive opportunities to observe the North Korean government's decision making processes up close as the head of an NGO that has been active in famine relief and fighting tuberculosis in North Korea for a decade. While conceding that bringing humanitarian assistance to an abrupt end doesn't necessarily augur well for the future, Linton argued that there is a clear reasoning behind the decision provided you remember, though few do, that the North Korean government has a strong institutional memory. The past looms much larger in its decision making than it does for the NGOs operating in the country. As Linton views it, North Korea's decision reflects its initial reaction to the food shortages that began in 1995. As stocks in the country's public distribution system dwindled, officials had a clear solution: "[they planned] to solicit international aid for a short period of time...[and then] restart their juche economy," Linton said. Because they didn't recognize the crisis as the systemic failure that it was, they didn't come up with a systemic solution. As the food situation has been getting steadily better since 1997, officials now feel confident about pushing away foreign aid—which after nearly 10 years was developing an unsavory sense of permanence—and reinstituting the pre-1995 public distribution system. The warming to international norms that many NGOs had hoped would spring from North Korea's experience working with the outside world simply hasn't materialized in the minds of the North Korean officials. The return to juche economics, says Linton, shows that the North Korean government is reasserting its core values.