The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [225]
A variety of other nations and charitable organizations also contributed food or funds to purchase food. Yet the emergency continued, compounded by a serious drought in the summer of 1997, followed by tidal waves along the western coast that devastated additional growing areas. It was as if nature had conspired with the unyielding economic policies of their government to bedevil the lives of North Koreans.
The scale of the human tragedy was immense, yet impossible to measure with precision in the secretive country. A team of researchers from the Buddhist Sharing Movement interviewed 1,019 refugees from North Korea just across the Chinese border during eight months in 1997-8, and reported that a shocking 27 percent of the family members of the refugees had died since mid-1995. The movement's executive director estimated that 2.5 million people or more may die - "a famine that may be among the worst in human history." U.S. intelligence officials who had been accumulating and examining the evidence told me in September 1998 they had no precise data, but that "certainly hundreds of thousands" of North Koreans had died from starvation or starvation-related illnesses and that 1 million deaths up to that time seemed "not impossible." About the same time, a State Department official with direct responsibility for Korean relations said he believed that "easily more than 500,000 people" had died.
Jasper Becker, a Beijing-based journalist who wrote a book about the 1958-62 Chinese famine that killed at least 30 million people, found a chilling resemblance to that tragedy in the contemporary DPRK. "This is the world's least fashionable humanitarian crisis, but it is probably worse than anything the world has seen for nearly four decades," Becker wrote in 1998. Like the famine in China, Becker attributed the disaster in North Korea principally to government policy.
THE PASSAGE OF HWANG JANG YOP
On the morning of February 12, 1997, a South Korean businessman in Beijing telephoned the South Korean Consulate in the Chinese capital with a momentous request: that a car and escort be sent to initiate the political asylum and defection of Hwang JangYop, one of North Korea's most prominent officials and the architect of its juche philosophy. ROK officials, who were expecting the call, declined to send one of their diplomatic vehicles to pick up the 74-year-old North Korean, fearing they would later be accused of kidnapping him. A few minutes later Hwang, accompanied only by his longtime aide and fellow defector, Kim Duk Hong, arrived by taxi and walked into the consulate, asking for protection and safe transit to Seoul. Shortly after that he sat at the desk of the ROK consul-general and wrote a three-page declaration in his own hand:
Starting with my family, all the people [in the North] will judge that I have gone mad when they learn that I have decided to go to the South, abandoning everything. I actually feel-on not a few occasions-that I have gone mad myself.
But am I the only person who has gone mad? More than 50 years after the Korean people were divided, the two halves regard each other as an enemy and keep threatening to turn each other into a sea of flames while saying they want to realize national unification. How could we regard this as the behavior of sane people?
In addition, at a time when workers and farmers are starving, how could we consider people sane who loudly say they have built an ideal society for them? ...
Only a few years remain for my life. I am a person that has failed in politics. I do not have the slightest idea of seeking personal fame and prosperity, working for one side. I do not want to live long either. I hope that my family consider me dead as of today. If possible,