I always thought our media was sensationalistic; if a story was violent or lurid, then it was assured space on the page and time on air. Yet when The Telegraph, one of the major newspapers of Great Britain, runs the headline \Famine-struck N. Koreans 'eating children',"" I heard nothing about the story in the American press. If you skimmed the headline, I will summarize it for you: ""cannibalism.""
This seems like perfect material to be splashed across the front page of newspapers across the country. Nothing fascinates more than the prospect of cannibalism, one of the few taboos left in our culture. So, why the silence?
Perhaps other news venues thought it was too good to be true. Cannibalism has always been one of the most effective ways to brand others as horrible savages. I use the insult all the time. Surely, this report was fabricated to make the North Koreans look evil, oh, so evil.
However, these reports do not come from the United States or other sources who most want to discredit North Korea, but from the refugees escaping the country. North Korean Refugees Assistance Fund, which smuggles food and medicine into North Korea, interviewed more than 200 refugees for their report. As one refugee stated, ""Pieces of 'special' meat are displayed on straw mats for sale. People know where they came from, but they don't talk about it."" The reported that cannibalism definitely seems to exist.
The United Nations World Food Program has asked numerous times for access to markets where human flesh is said to be sold, but the North Korean government always claims that it is impossible because of ""security"" concerns. The government allegedly has their own way of dealing with the problem: execution. One refugee, Mr. Lee, 54, said he feared that his missing grandsons, aged 8 and 11, had been killed for food. As he searched widely for them, the boys' friends said they had vanished near a market. Mr. Lee said police who raided a nearby restaurant found body parts. The business' owners were shot.
The North Korean government's brutal solution ignores the vast starvation that is the root of the problem. People living in that isolated prison-state are not savage, only incredibly hungry. In the past decade, an estimated 2 to 3 million North Koreans have starved to death. For a little perspective, North Korea only has a population of 22 million. When one in 10 people are dying of starvation, the emergence of cannibalism is much easier to understand. Why allow all the meat from corpses to be buried when it could keep you and your family alive for another few weeks? Cannibalism is nothing more than the most extreme sign of desperation.
Besides the unwillingness to believe stories about cannibalism, another reason this story has been so underplayed is probably the fear that portraying North Korea in too poor a light will provide fodder for hawks in the Bush administration. But, even the military under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has admitted that there is no viable military alternative for neutralizing North Korea.
Ignoring this problem only helps the North Korean government. Even when the issue is covered, starvation is blamed on natural causes and lack of international help. The Telegraph only cites, ""North Korea's ability to feed itself has been hit by floods, deforestation and lack of farm fertilizers and equipment"" as well as a drop in aid from Japan and the United States. These are not the causes of starvation; the ideological driven government is the cause of starvation.
If the government is responsive to the people and willing to sacrifice to feed them, then even severe drought will not lead to starvation. As Amartya Sen, an economist and Nobel Prize winner, demonstrated, there has never been a famine in a working democracy.
Furthermore, foreign aid has dropped because both Japan and the United States realized that aid was used to support North Korea's military and political loyalists, with almost none of the food going to the people actually starving. Aid must not be given until North Korea allows the United Nations and other organizations to distribute the food outside of the regime's supervision.
Until then, our money does nothing more than support a Stalinist government unwilling to sacrifice its military or nuclear program to feed its own people. We can not give aid directly to the country that has so failed its citizens as to force them into cannibalism.
