Amnesty slams North Korea’s brutality
Amnesty International has charged North Korea’s communist government with outrageous inaction as thousands continue to die as a result of food shortages.
Amnesty’s report – North Korea: Starved of Rights – Human Rights and the Food Crisis – released at the World Social Forum in India, slams Kim Jong II’s reclusive Stalinist state with distributing food unfairly, favouring the loyal and the hard working.
The human rights pressure group said food aid was used as “an instrument of political and economic pressure and a means to persecute perceived political opponents.”
Amnesty said people caught stealing food had been publicly executed, and reported that children were forced to witness the executions as a method to instil the message “not to bite the hand that starves them.”
Lesley Warner, Amnesty International UK’s media director said: “The right to food is a basic human right, and the government of North Korea appears to be failing in its duties to respect, protect and fulfil this right.
“The North Korean government should ensure that food shortages are not used as a tool to persecute perceived political opponents and that humanitarian organisations, in particular UN agencies, have free and unimpeded access to all parts of North Korea.
“Hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of acute food shortages over the last decade caused by a series of natural disasters, the loss of support from the former Soviet Union and government mismanagement. Several million children are suffering from chronic malnutrition, impairing their physical and mental development.”
Separately, America pledged yesterday to speed up food aid shipments to North Korea, after UN agency, the World Food Program, said a paucity of foreign donations meant it had to curtail food aid to millions of North Koreans.
The WFP said 2.7 million North Korean women and children would suffer due to the lack of foreign donations.
Although the US, EU and Australia pledged food aid, supplies could take up to three months to arrive, the UN body reported.
In December, the WFP began cutting food supplies to some of 4.2 million “core beneficiaries” – namely children, pregnant women and elderly people.
But in January, 2.7 million “core beneficiaries” were not being fed, a UN spokesman said.
The WFP forecasted it could feed a total of 6.2 million of the reclusive communist state’s 20-million population in 2004 but without external funding it may have to recalculate its original estimate.
