Suki Kim has a heartfelt piece today in the Wall Street Journal, available here on OpinionJournal.com.
Ms. Kim is a Korean. She tells how her family lost touch with her uncle in the opening drama of the Korean War. It's telling:
The family was boarding a train to get out of Seoul ahead of the advancing NKPA. All five were aboard "when someone screamed out that young men should give up their seats for women and children." So her uncle got off what ended up being the last train out. "Later, a neighbor reported seeing him tied up and being dragged away by the North Korean soldiers."
Ms. Kim doesn't ask, but I'm curious who yelled that out. The Inmin Goon was known for its, uhm, aggressive recruitment techniques.
Ms. Kim traveled to North Korea in 2002 to look for her uncle, but did not find him:
The regime of North Korea has done a most efficient job of wiping out Korea's 5,000-year history, imbued with Buddhism, Shamanism and Confucianism, with one amnesia-inflicting spell called "Juche," its political philosophy of self-reliance. And what seems to make the Great Leader [Kim Il Sung] so "great" is that he has replaced their lost memory. For my uncle to have survived there, he either would have had to forget everything he had known, or learned to believe in the Great Leader. Or it is possible that he held on with the hope for the two Koreas to reunite."
(Kim Il Sung is the father of current "leader" of DPRK, Kim Jong Il. In the worker's paradise, the pater Kim is the "Great Leader" and is barely acknowledged as more than perhaps sleeping for a spell. The younger Kim is the "Dear Leader" and ruler absolute.)
But what can sanctions do to North Korea, Ms. Kim worries, and rightly so.
Just last month, the World Food Program launched an appeal for more funds to fight the food shortage in North Korea, worsened by the August flood that had, according to the state's figures, killed and left homeless hundreds, although various human rights groups claim numbers closer to hundreds of thousands if not millions. Over a third of all children are reported to be malnourished. According to Amnesty International, 400,000 have perished from political persecution; 150,000 are still held in underground concentration camps. Since the much condemned July 4 missile tests, humanitarian aid has been cut drastically.
I don't know what the solution is. Sanctions will only make more North Koreans starve. The "Dear Leader" can't feed his people, but he can build nuclear weapons. But:
[South Korean] President Roh Moo Hyun's increasingly less popular "sunshine policy" has provided a conduit through which money is funneled into North Korea for supposed economic reform, although it now looks as though it has effectually funded the North's nuclear program.
So aid probably won't go to help North Koreans anyway.
This is going to be messy and probably bloody, no matter what.
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