Why Has Not North Failed Yet? 3

Why Has Not North Failed Yet? 3

                                                                               

                                                                               Shinae Hong(shinae810@yahoo.com)

 

 

 Absence of Economic Opportunity to Mobilize

 

 

Presuming that mobilizing a rebel group against the central government in power requires the resources to provide the actual costs of the rebellion and the availability of any “lootable” or “obstructable” resources,[1] can be used as an indicator predicting when civil war or intrastate conflict would likely occur in many failing states.  This assumption perhaps plays an important role, not only in many resource rich Sub-Saharan African countries, but it also provides a counter example in the resource poor DPRK where industry is under-developed and arable land is in short supply.

 

Moreover, rigorous communist state property law prohibits the stealing food and other state property that are subject to harsh punishment.  The popular protest in North Korea is unlikely forthcoming because social movement actors do not have the opportunistic resource to form a mobilization.Rather, North Koreans are an impoverished people struggling for daily survival.  Visitors to the North Korea frequently report watching hollow-eyed people sitting by the road sides, lying in bus stations and sleeping in fields.  Likewise, various researchers studying North Korea assess that “many North Koreans are too sick to work or to study, or apparently even to analyze their predicament. 

 

People die silently by thousands in their homes, in the fields.”[2]  A docile populace will not threaten the regime, but neither will it generate economic wealth. Extreme poverty has left the population with empty stomachs too weak to struggle against the central government. 

 

 

Since the mid 1970s, accompanying the economic collapse, food production in the DPRK has visibly declined and daily rations have continued to fall.  The famine of the 1990s led generations of North Koreans who have become physically and psychologically weakened by malnutrition.  The government of North Korea began the ‘Eat Two Meals a Day’ campaign and introduced ‘substitute foods’ such as grass, rice roots, acorns, tree bark, soups made with wild plants and weeds.

 

  It also offered recipes to remove the reported poisonous parts of plants.[3]  According to the World Food Program (WFP) report, many North Koreans subsisted on nine ounces of rations a day with poor nutritional benefit, less than half the recommended minimum daily intake.[4] Not surprisingly, there have been multiple reports from the international media citing evidences of cannibalism in the DPRK.  Most allegations were gathered by the North Korean Refugees Assistance Fund (NKRAF) and from the testimonies of North Korean refugees.  Several accounts claim that “human meat” was being sold in the market under the name of “special meat.”  “People know where it came from, but they don't talk about it,” commented one refugee.[5]  The situation is even worse in prison camps.

 

  According to Hwan, a former prisoner of 10 years, who in describing the gruesome pictures of North Korean cannibalism in prison, said,  “In order to survive people eat everything including rats, cockroaches, and snakes.  Children simply disappear from the camps.”[6]  These allegations were taken seriously by the UN World Food Program (WFP) which requested that the government give it access to "farmers' markets," where human meat is said to be traded.  Pyongyang rejected the request, citing “security reasons” but added that the “the penalty for cannibalism was death.”[7]

 

 

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[1] Political economy school of thoughts does focus on the availability of natural resources to fund internal conflict by allowing internal or revel groups to purchase weapons from either international sources or regional sources.   See Michael Ross “Michael L. Ross, “Oil, Drugs and Diamonds: The Varying Roles of Natural Resources in Civil War,” in Karen Ballentine and Jake Sherman (eds), The Political Economy of Armed Conflict (Boulder: Lynne Rienner and IPA, 2003), pp. 47-72. Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper, “The Regional Dimensions of Civil War Economies,” Chapter 2 in their War Economies in Regional Context, (Boulder: Lynne Rienner & IPA, 2004), pp. 17-44.

 

[2] Kongdan Oh, Ralph Hassig. “North Korea Between Collapse and Reform”

[3] Paul French.pp.122-123

[4] Pyongyang permitted the Nutrition Survey of the DPRK to be conducted by the EU, UNICEF and the WFP. The survey found that in North Hamgyong province 62 per cent of of children were chronically malnourished and a further 16 per cent was severely malnourished.

[5] Paul French.pp.122-123

[6] These reports have appeared in many newspapers worldwide. For instance, ‘Famine-Struck N Koreans “Eating Children”, Sunday Telegraph, 8 June 2003; ‘The Poverty-Stricken World of North Korea’ The Age, 29 October 2003.

[7] Ibid, 2003.