Pandemic, potential famine unnerve Kim
The tenth year of Kim Jong Un’s totalitarian reign is shaping up to be his most challenging yet. North Korea’s borders have been closed for 15 months because of the coronavirus that began in neighbouring China, inflicting much more pain on the state’s decrepit economy than decades of sanctions ever did.
Trade with China – both at a state level and the small-scale exporting that enables ordinary North Koreans to earn money to buy food – has ground almost entirely to a halt.
Donald Trump, Kim’s best chance at normalising North Korea’s relationship with its arch enemy, has been ejected from the White House. His successor, Joe Biden, has reverted to a much more traditional kind of diplomacy, the kind that requires more than flattery from Kim.
But worst of all, food shortages inside North Korea are now so severe that outside observers and even Kim himself are warning another famine could be looming.
In the 1990s, somewhere between 500,000 and three million people died as a result of a famine brought about by decades of gross mismanagement but triggered by floods. Those who survived did so by eating grass and tree bark.
While the famine eventually passed, severe food shortages have remained. Latest UN data suggests that almost half of North Koreans are undernourished, and 19 per cent of children under the age of five are so malnourished that their growth is visibly stunted.
Human rights advocates are sounding the alarm that this already dire situation is deteriorating rapidly, noting increased reports of starvation and begging.
Kim appeared to acknowledge this when he warned last week that North Korea was facing ‘‘unprecedentedly numerous challenges’’ and was in its ‘‘worstever situation’’. He exhorted officials to ‘‘relieve our people of the difficulty, even a little’’.
Clearly, Kim is not suffering from a lack of food. He has found ways to get what he wants, whether it be gourmet supplies or brand new Mercedes cars. Even now, he appears to be prioritising himself. The website NK News reports that Kim appears to have upgraded another of his seaside palaces and docked two of his super-yachts there.
Kim’s notably frank admission could be part of a ploy to use the pandemic as an excuse to exert ever tighter control over the North Korean people. Further controlling their movements and increasing surveillance in the name of Covid19 prevention could be an effort to stop bad news travelling and dissent growing.
But they could also be a sign of his own fears about his grip on power. The famine almost brought down his father, who survived by prioritising his own survival over that of the North Korean people. He refused to import food. Remaining crops and incoming aid were channelled to the elites in Pyongyang and the military that protects the regime. Everyone else was left to their own devices.
The North Korean leader now finds himself in a similar situation. In the 1990s, Kim Jong Il was trying to deal with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the same time as descending into the famine. Now, it is a pandemic not the end of the Cold War that is reshaping the world and threatening Kim Jong Un’s hold.
Dictators are a paranoid bunch, always fretting about coups and plots and uprisings. Kim, who was an inexperienced, unqualified 27-year-old when he inherited an anachronistic totalitarian regime in 2011, has more reason than most to be worried.
I have interviewed scores of escapees from North Korea and almost all of them knew that the state propaganda about Kim Jong Un was nothing but lies. But there is no opposition or dissent or even graffiti in North Korea because the system is still unfathomably repressive.
Could the combination of a pandemic and a potential famine loosen the Kim family grip on North Korea after 75 years? Could this be, as Mao Zedong in neighbouring China once famously said, the match that starts a prairie fire?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in years of writing about this regime, it’s that the Kims are masters at playing an exceptionally weak hand well. Again and again, they’ve defied predictions of imminent collapse.
But I’ve also learned about the incredible suffering of 25 million North Korean people. Kim Jong Un might try to use the pandemic as an excuse, but we in the outside world must not.
We should be thinking now about how we can support the people of North Korea, who are starved of both food and information.