‘We are all essentially responsible for helping them out. That’s what good humanitarian assistance is all about.’


A vexing dilemma of international engagement with North Korea is whether humanitarian aid to ordinary people there helps prop up the regime that abuses its own people.

It’s a moral Catch-22 that confounds easy answers where an obvious good ― feeding starving children ― might support an obvious evil by propping up a ruthlessly oppressive regime.

“People do say that, but if you tie yourself up in knots over this then you can rationalize not feeding babies, and you should not do that at all,” said Irish Ambassador to South Korea Eamonn McKee in an interview with The Korea Herald at his office in Seoul on Sept. 25.

McKee has dual accreditation, representing Ireland in both Koreas, and recently returned from a fact-finding trip in the North.

“The North Korean population finds itself in a particular situation bequeathed by history and by geopolitics and, at the end of the day, ordinary North Koreans should not be the victims,” he said. “We are all essentially responsible for helping them out. That’s what good humanitarian assistance is all about.”

Ireland supports humanitarian assistance in North Korea through its contributions to the World Food Programme and Concern Worldwide, two of six resident international NGOs with operations there.

Ireland gives about $250,000 in nutritional support to the World Food Programme, and is one of the U.N. group’s top 10 contributors.

The WFP is the main international organization delivering food assistance to North Korea’s most impoverished rural populations, which bear the brunt of malnutrition due to flooding, a dearth of clean drinking water and destructive agriculture practices, in addition to the oppressive politics for which the North is so notorious.

“We have a lot of debates about the nature of humanitarian aid and how it should be delivered,” he said. 

The WFP feeds about 2.5 million women and children in North Korea in some 85 counties across the country. One such site is an orphanage that McKee visited during his recent trip there.

The food is produced in 12 WFP-supported factories around the country in a deal with the North that splits the costs, the North paying for running of the factory and the WFP for raw materials and packaging.

Flooding in the North in June and July killed almost 200 people, left 400 missing and more than 200,000 homeless. As a result, food aid became urgent and, according to media reports, U.N. officials said restrictions to increased monitoring had been eased, at least temporarily.

North Korea has struggled since the 1990s when a famine hit the country and has limped along ever since. The U.N. asked for about $200 million in humanitarian aid saying the country continues to suffer from malnutrition among a litany of other problems.

Ballistic missile tests and other provocations by the North, however, have taxed the patience of potential donors like South Korea and the United States.

What is more, some human rights groups criticized humanitarian aid to North Korea, saying the help is diverted to propping up the regime.

Without proper verification or heightened monitoring standards, critics say, food aid merely rewards bad behavior, props up an evil regime and prolongs the misery of ordinary North Koreans.

Former lawmaker Park Sun-young, who recently launched Dream Makers For North Korea, a human rights group based in Seoul, said that, although food aid in the North is laudable, she has serious concerns over its monitoring.

“It is well known that a lot of humanitarian aid is being diverted to party elites and the military,” she said. “Food aid should not be used to prolong the life of this dictatorship.”

“Humanitarian aid should be tied to improvements by the North Korean government in the human rights situation.”

Food aid by the WFP is getting to the women and children it is meant for, said Claudia von Roehl, WFP country representative in North Korea, when asked about monitoring efforts. 

“We have a solid monitoring system in place. Our food aid monitors travel the country and visit all the places where the food we provide is delivered: ports, county warehouses, hospitals, kindergartens, nurseries. We even do household visits,” she said. “Last year alone we traveled well over 600,000 kilometers in the country and made over 2,000 of such visits. We saw that the food is reaching the intended beneficiaries,” von Roehl said.

Ireland also supports development assistance, giving about $500,000 to Concern Worldwide.

Concern built about a dozen food-processing facilities, like a rice de-husker in a village in Kumchon, North Hwanghae Province, and renewable energy facilities for electric lights and drinking water, like a solar-powered drinking water system in a village in Hoechang, South Pyongan Province.

Jin Park, international coordinator of Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights (NKnet), said that humanitarian aid should be extended unconditionally and regardless of a country’s human rights record, but criticized how the WFP delivered food aid.

“I do not know the most recent policy of the WFP in North Korea. However, in the past, the WFP did not conduct satisfactory monitoring,” Park said.

“(The WFP) relied on North Korea-provided interpreters and did not visit certain parts of the country, and accepted the report by the North Korean authorities, which was suspected to be fabricated to induce more aid to the country,” he said.

Van Roehl said that the WFP has worked hard to secure a stringent monitoring framework for its operations in the North.

“Currently we employ three international staff who are Korean speakers. We have agreed with (North Korea) that access to our operations is immediately granted upon our request,” she said.

“We are also able to select the localities, institutions and households we wish to visit at random upon arrival in a county. These conditions are being respected and give us the confidence we need that our food is going to the people for whom it is intended.”

By Philip Iglauer (ephilip2011@heraldcorps.com)