Dark side of the moon

Yet the focus on nukes comes at the cost of other things worth noting about North Korea. Human rights, for instance. In recent years the outlines of daily life, and the state's miserable part in it, have become plain. First came the horror stories told by refugees in China escaping the famine from 1995 to 1998 that killed between 600,000 and one million people. A more detailed picture has since emerged from refugees now settled in South Korea, from aid workers, diplomats and from satellite pictures which, among other things, map another form of encampment -- the North's gulag.

So long out of sight, out of mind. Yet the emerging picture is horrendous, especially for ordinary people in the lesser cities and hardscrabble northern provinces. Take a slice of daily life from the bulletin of a South Korean aid outfit, Good Friends. It is plausibly consistent if unverifiable. Around Wonsan city, more than 70 per cent of residents survive on a corn porridge mixed with grass. In mountainous Kangwon province, residents fear the biggest food shortage next spring since the "Arduous March" (i.e., the famine). Much of the trouble lies with a campaign, called the "150-day battle," just ended, to boost socialist production and turn North Korea into a "powerful nation" by 2012. It took farmers away from their plots. "We are being led to our deaths," says one.

In South Pyongan province, farmers organize patrols to prevent grain theft. One confronted three soldiers attempting to steal corn. When a police officer was called in, the soldiers attacked him. In South Hamgyong province, the government has run out of fuel for heavy machinery so residents have to move heavy rocks by hand. In South Pyongan province, housewives complain about being forced to make gloves for dam-workers, send meat to the army and collect scrap metal. In Chungjin city, the construction office has been unable to feed its 550 employees for 16 months. The rate of absenteeism has reached a third. In a "labour-exertion drive," 10 policemen enforce attendance.

Experts do not predict another famine. But swaths of the population are struggling. The chief coping mechanisms are the informal markets and trading networks that sprang up to cope with the famine and the breakdown of the state food-distribution system. Private markets provide perhaps half of the calories North Koreans consume, and four-fifths of household income.

The black markets are a response to state failure. Yet since 2005 the regime has cracked down on them. A groundbreaking report this month for the East-West Centre in Hawaii, by Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, emphasizes the central role the penal system has played in this. There are now many more labour camps for lower-level offences, including black-market activity, petty theft and even wandering the country in search of food. The new camps, with sentences typically under two years, have been grafted on to a system of longer-term penitentiaries. The most notorious of these are the concentration camps for "political" criminals. It is known that the state ranks the population by its loyalty to the dictator, Kim Jong Il, and about half are "wavering." Some 150,000-200,000 political criminals (including whole families branded as counter-revolutionaries) are believed to be incarcerated in five huge camps. Many do not come out alive.

Strikingly, former inmates of the lowest-level camps report witnessing as much brutality and deprivation as do those in the long-term camps, and sometimes more. Every one of those surveyed had witnessed forced starvation; three-quarters had seen executions; and half had seen death from torture or beatings. Arrest and sentencing are arbitrary. That helps maintain the regime, and, guess Haggard and Noland, gives those who run the penal system a tool for extortion. Market traders will pay bribes to be left alone. From nuclear top to black-market bottom, the state is one giant protection racket.

At some point the West will need to address its shame of not facing up to the abuse sooner and more viscerally. In the meantime, President Barack Obama hardly sent the right message by taking eight months to appoint his special representative for human rights in North Korea. Still, the question is what to do about the place. Regime change is out of the question. Moreover, China, which has the greatest leverage over its neighbour, prizes the regime's stability above even denuclearization. South Korea officially espouses unification, but most citizens see the North as not just another country but another planet, one best left in its orbit.

Some of the techniques that helped undermine the Soviet Union could help in North Korea. More could be spent on radio broadcasts that offer another reality to the state-manufactured one. Loyalty to the regime could be undermined in subtler ways, such as offering apparatchiks and the elite education abroad. But the grim reality is that the nuclear dance preoccupies American chiefs, precluding an overdue appraisal of the horrors the North Korean state metes out to its people.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 26, 2009 A14