Hunger and Human Rights:
The Politics of Famine

Václav Havel
Prague, 1 August 2005

In recent years we have met with a wave of terrorist attacks, with mass migration, with a deterioration of the environment, and with instability in many other areas. Besides this we hold lively debates about, and attempt to help effectively, the poorest countries and those who cannot exercise their basic civic and human rights. We experience many deep disagreements. But nowhere do we come up against a state as closed as North Korea, whose citizens live in utter isolation, who can avail of no human rights and who, what is more, are the victims of a centrally run, i.e. state-supported, humanitarian catastrophe. For the second decade, that country is experiencing a chronic shortage of food; the famine at the end of the 1990s was the direct cause of the deaths of at least one million people. That famine, however, need not have been North Korea's fate, if its own citizens had not been denied the most basic human rights.

The attached study documents, for instance, the parallel growth in humanitarian aid as the government of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea stopped importing food and gradually reduced the purchase of grain to as low as one-tenth. So instead of the destitute population being fed and supplies of food being supplemented thanks to international aid, the communist regime has saved the dollars raised in order to shore up its power. After over ten years of humanitarian missions on the territory of North Korea, these programs are far from fulfilling international standards. We have no guarantee that aid is reaching the truly needy, and the communist regime consistently spoils any attempts to control its distribution. International solidarity is therefore abused directly by government structures, with the privileged army to the forefront. Furthermore, efforts to monitor needs and distribution in a more detailed manner by the World Food Programme are made relative by the direct imports of South Korea and China. The brutal regime supplies them only to the most loyal. If anyone bears even a sign of suspicion that he has lost blind faith, the suspect is immediately deprived of basic foodstuffs and medical aid; he loses his job and even the chance to receive an education. It is not unusual to end up in a system of concentration camps not dissimilar to the Soviet Gulags.

We stand before a huge ethical dilemma: Is it possible-and, if so, to what extent-to help starving North Koreans, whose fates depend on us a great deal more than on their government, if at the same time we are forever deceived and systematically blackmailed? An army armed with weapons of mass destruction is, to be sure, a permanent threat to the whole region. Let us recall that in the 1930s, Stalin unleashed a government-organized famine in Ukraine, the aim of which was to destroy the kulaks and to reinforce totalitarian power. In connection with the North Korean tragedy, we have therefore to pose the question whether through giving humanitarian aid we are at the same time reinforcing perhaps the worst political regime on the planet, a regime which is prepared to reinforce its power in the most drastic of means.