Pity the poor nongovernmental organizations trying to work in North Korea. They face a monumental challenge -- aiding a society that is starving and crumbling -- yet their standard operating procedures don't work and they have little or no leverage when dealing with Pyongyang. It is, by all accounts, a lose-lose situation.
L. Gordon Flake and Scott Snyder, two of America's leading North Korea watchers, serve up a concise and informative account of the grim frustration that dominates NGO efforts in North Korea. It details the NGO experience from American, South Korean and European perspectives. Sadly, they are all similar: shared hopes, thwarted ambitions and real ambivalence about the impact such organizations can have on North Korea. NGO officials worry that their efforts support a corrupt and militaristic regime, with little tangible effect on the people who need aid most. Those fears appear well founded.
Accurate information on the scale of the North Korea crisis is hard to come by, but there is now virtually universal agreement that the difficulties are massive and structural. One authoritative estimate concludes that the famine of the late 1990s resulted in the deaths of 600,000 to 1 million people out of a prefamine population of 22 million. The authors in this study agree that "the U.N. World Food Program has now become an essential crutch upon which North Korea depends for its survival."