‘Oh, It Is Hell!’: Visitors Describe N. Korea Hunger Relatives’ Tales Far More Harrowing Than Anything Western Workers Allowed To See
On the Chinese side of the broad river here is a boomtown with bright lights, tall cranes and gleaming new buildings springing up amid open sewers and shacks. On the other bank is the North Korean city of Namyang, where factories are shut, water service is sporadic and on a recent night only three tiny lights could be seen twinkling.
Horrified Chinese visitors are crossing the long bridge that links the hermetic hell of North Korea with this well-fed Chinese town. They are returning with tales of a hunger far more harrowing than anything Western aid workers have been permitted to observe in carefully supervised visits to North Korea.
And in a rare, dangerous breach of the Stalinist state’s steely code of silence, a recently arrived North Korean woman last week offered a brutal affirmation of the famine in the North, telling of winter mornings when she passed corpses of children who had died of hunger and cold in the streets.
Her weathered face streamed with tears as she told of families committing suicide, parents splitting up to scour the countryside for food, and abandoned children begging for sustenance in railroad stations - even in the showplace capital city of Pyongyang.
The North Korean government’s admission that 134 children have died of malnutrition is “a total lie,” she declared. Instead North Koreans, she said, believe at least 100,000 people have perished since 1995 of malnutrition, cold and lack of medicine.
She told of trading away precious quilts for food and spending evenings guarding her few remaining belongings against famished thieves and marauding soldiers.
She said that any notion of egalitarian unity in North Korea has been shattered because hungry workers and soldiers have seen Communist Party elites and officers divert foreign rice for themselves while giving the workers imported animal fodder.
But while the bitterness and grumbling is growing in North Korea, dictator Kim Jong Il and his regime face no threat, the woman and others said in an interview last week.
Her view of the regime’s stability was supported by another North Korean woman, Chinese businessmen and relatives who have recently returned from the North. “I doubt they will rebel before they all starve,” one visitor said of the North Koreans.
On Monday, a Chinese-Korean family returned home, walking across the bridge to China from Namyang, after delivering rice and money to relatives.
“When I visited them three years ago, they had rice, if not much,” the Chinese-Korean man said of his kin. “This time, oh, it is hell! There is no describing their misery.”
His wife said of their relatives: “They are all dark-complexioned (from malnutrition) and their skin is flapping - even the children.”
Conditions in Namyang, though, are believed to be among the best in North Korea thanks to handouts from relatives in China. But factories there have shut down for lack of fuel and homes are supplied with running water for only one hour a day, the family said. No rations have been distributed for a year, and the population of about 3,000 is surviving on corn porridge.
“We couldn’t eat it,” the man said. “It was fit only for pigs.”
It took his relatives six days to travel the few hundred miles from their home to Namyang to meet them, since there is insufficient fuel to run the coal-fired trains. “There is no coal because the miners cannot mine it. They’re too hungry,” he said.
But coal miners are supposed to get more food than anyone else. In contrast, the ration for college students in Pyongyang is just 16 kernels of corn per day, the North Korean woman said.
“People have been eating wild plants and tree bark for several years now,” she said.
Another woman, while acknowledging starvation, defended Kim Jong Il’s government against the angry complaints of her appalled, disbelieving relatives. “If only we had a big harvest, we would have no worries,” she said.
Although both women were anxious that the world hear of North Korea’s plight, they asked that their names, hometowns and other identifying details not be given.
“If they find out I have talked, 10 generations of my family will be punished,” one woman said.
Both women blamed a U.S.-led trade embargo of North Korea for strangling their nation.
And both said North Koreans long to make war on those who they believe are persecuting them. “Everyone, including me, is wondering why our dear leader Kim Jong Il is sitting idle while we are going hungry,” said the government supporter.
“It is all because of the isolation policy of outsiders. We can either starve to death or we can die fighting. … We should fight.”
The women also told of these things, reports that could not be confirmed:
The official government distribution of food now amounts to less than 100 grams per person per day - less than one-fourth the daily adult requirement. But many areas have received no food at all for a year. Some got rations of cattle feed that made many quite ill.
Ordinary North Koreans have not seen “a single grain” of rice sent by the United Nations - which this month pledged $126 million in new aid to North Korea, enough to feed some 3.5 million famine victims - and other groups. “It has all been taken away to the military or to Pyongyang,” one of the women said.
North Koreans began dying in large numbers in 1995. Thousands succumbed to heat and malnutrition in the month of mourning that followed Kim Il Sung’s death in July 1995, when no food was distributed to a malnourished populace. A cholera epidemic then killed even more North Koreans. This winter, at least 20,000 people are believed to have starved to death in remote coal-mining regions alone.
Soldiers, who long have knocked on doors at night asking for meals, now are digging up potatoes from fields, looting homes and snatching supplies from markets. Most North Koreans have accepted preferential allocations for the army, since their sons must serve seven years. But lately only the officers are getting fed.