Just how bad is the famine in North Korea? Natsios is a vocal proponent of what one expert calls the “Manchurian view.” It is built largely on accounts from refugees and defectors who escape over the border into China–some with tales of cannibalism and other horrors. In the past nine months surveys of the refugees have produced estimates of a death toll as high as 2.5 to 3 million since the first signs of crisis in 1995. In an upcoming book written for the United States Institute of Peace, Natsios argues that mounting evidence places the Kim-family regime alongside Mao and Stalin on the list of 20th-century totalitarian dictators who inflicted massive famines on their people, and kept the carnage hidden. “It’s inexcusable that the West let this happen again,” says Natsios. “A lot of people are starting to realize that they’ve been had.”
The debate rages on. Many U.S. and U.N. officials are skeptical of the refugee testimony, and prefer to rely on the “Pyongyang view,” or reports from about 100 Westerners now based in the North Korean capital. Starting in 1996 the Kim regime began easing its defiant “self-reliance” and opening up to foreign relief workers. They have found evidence of an entire generation stunted by hunger, but not of widespread deaths. “My problem with estimates as high as 2.5 million is that my people in the field just don’t see it,” says Judith Cheng Hopkins, Asia head of the U.N. World Food Program, which leads the relief effort. “That’s a huge number to hide in a population of 21 million. So where are the bodies?”
Critics offer several answers. Unlike the African model of stick figures dying en masse on open plains, Korea’s famine is grinding the population down slowly, and victims die in the privacy of homes and hospitals. Pyongyang officials still treat the death toll as a deep state secret. They keep a close eye on the WFP, insisting that the monitors cannot be Korean speakers, and travel only with escorts. More than 50 of North Korea’s 211 counties remain off limits for unspecified “security reasons.” Still, could even the Pyongyang spy apparatus conceal 2.5 million bodies under the noses of the monitors? “The North Koreans have made fools of foreign inspectors a thousand times,” says one of the most experienced Western travelers in North Korea. “Anything is possible.”
In fact, none of the Westerners in Pyongyang see counting the dead as a priority. “We don’t ask to see bodies, and they don’t show us,” says a USAID official. Already, the WFP is feeding some 6 million people, including virtually the entire population under 7, and last week it announced plans to feed an additional 2 million, including teens and the elderly. WFP officials prefer to focus on the millions saved, not the unknown number of dead, and so do U.S. officials. “Whether there are 10,000, 100,000 or 1 million dead, the real question is, how do you respond?” asks a U.S. State Department spokesman. “We’ve recognized a serious humanitarian crisis, and we’re not ignoring it.”
Natsios and others argue that no famine has ever inspired such “Machiavellian” manipulation of the numbers. Many big powers had reason to downplay the death toll: China to keep meddling do-gooders out of its backyard; Japan to punish North Korean saber rattling; Europe out of pique at the WFP, which it sees as an arm of U.S. policy in North Korea. Early this year a confidential European Union report slammed the WFP for hyping the famine in order to attract more funding. Above all, says one famine expert, no one wants to hear evidence that North Korea is practicing famine “triage,” deliberately starving unproductive regions and workers, lest it raise uncomfortable “Kosovo questions” about how the world should respond. The truth? Even North Korean leader Kim Jong Il may not know the real death toll; and if he did, he wouldn’t tell.
