Korea Times
10/9/007
Most impoverished North Koreans do not have access to food aid sent by South Korea due to corruption and lack of proper monitoring, a human rights group said Tuesday.
“Many North Korean defectors have said they heard about a considerable amount of food aid from South Korea, but they have not received any of it,” said Kay Seok, a researcher for the United States-based non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch, citing North Koreans who recently defected from one of the world’s poorest countries.
The remark comes amid accusations by critics here that hundreds of thousands of tons of South Korean rice aid may be funneled each year to the North Korean military and elite groups.
The Roh Moo-hyun administration, which has engaged the communist North despite Pyongyang’s detonation of a nuclear bomb in October last year, has often been criticized for failing to ensure that the food aid is distributed to those in need.
In an interview with Washington-based Radio Free Asia, Seok said the food aid is sold for profit in the North, stressing that South Korea needs to demand proper monitoring to ensure that the aid reaches the intended recipients.
One of the reasons that South Korean food aid does not reach poor North Korean people is that the food is given to privileged people or sold for profit by them, she explained.
“At the moment the food aid arrives at the port, merchants flocked about and buy it with U.S. dollars,” she said.
“In the course of the shipment to the final destination, shippers, stationmasters and high-ranking officials take the food either for themselves or for sale. Even sentinels take it,” according to defectors who witnessed it, she said.
South Korea has been providing North Korea with food aid since the mid-1990s. It resumed shipping aid to North Korea in June after a hiatus of more than one year as the North began taking steps toward nuclear disarmament. The promised aid, which consists of 400,000 tons of rice, will be delivered over the coming months.
