Now North Korea has acknowledged that its people are starving, the rest of the world is faced with a grim dilemma. Does it respond with massive emergency aid, to show that outsiders have more compassion for the hungry than their own rulers? Or does it withhold aid in a bid to bring the Pyongyang regime to heel? The easy answer is to bring in food now and worry about diplomatic pressures later. But easy answers are rarely the best. Strings must be attached.
North Korea's famine is man-made and self-inflicted. Outdated Stalinist agricultural policies have long discouraged production. Uncontrolled environmental destruction certainly exacerbated, and may have been the cause of, floods which wiped out the last two harvests. An incompetent, uncaring government has compounded the disaster by failing to buy food from outside, instead lavishing scarce resources on military might and weapons of mass destruction.
The diplomatic isolation of Kim Jong-il's brutal, power-hungry regime is not some vicious plot by South Korea and its western allies to force it into submission. The isolation is self-imposed. The regime has a deliberate policy of denying its own people any contact with the outside world and any chance to discover that life could be better under a more enlightened government. If North Korea had wanted to open its doors to the international community and welcome aid and investment it could have done so years ago, without necessarily heading down the road towards unification with South Korea and the inevitable fall of its regime.
An agreement to live at peace but without free movement of population between the two Koreas would suit the South as much as it would ensure the survival of the North. South Korea regards reunification as a distant ideal, not a realistic or even desirable goal for the foreseeable future. Instead of learning that lesson, Pyongyang has chosen to build up its military machine as if it were in imminent danger of being overrun. It threatens Seoul (where a quarter of the South's population now lives) with devastating conventional, chemical and possibly nuclear attack and has, until now, refused to talk about peace.
It is not clear that the famine has changed the Pyongyang regime's twisted perceptions of what is in its best long-term interests. Even now, it is holding its own people hostage, using their lives and future health as a bargaining counter. Its goals are not the satisfaction of its people's needs but diplomatic victories over Seoul. It has still not announced that it will take part in four-party talks with the United States, China and South Korea. A year after those talks on the future of the Korean Peninsula were proposed, the brinkmanship continues. This weekend, the North sent delegates to New York to make the announcement - and then failed to make it.
Yet, slowly, the desperation of the situation does seem to be sinking in. It is unclear whether this is because Pyongyang recognises the opportunity to exact concessions from adversaries who are under domestic pressure to show compassion, or because it fears its own position will weaken if the famine continues further. The regime has been increasingly ready to allow international charitable organisations in to monitor the distribution of aid. Yesterday, the North Korean Red Cross took the delicate step of welcoming food aid from the Southern Red Cross, although it still played politics by demanding that talks on the details should be held in Beijing, instead of in the border village of Panmunjom.
