North Korea Starved Its Countryside to Keep the Capital Alive

Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector who escaped as a teenager, remembers walking with her sister and passing a teenage boy whose intestines were coming out of his body. He was not asking for medicine. He was asking for food.

Park says that kind of hunger was not a natural disaster. She calls it man-made, a deliberate choice made after outside support disappeared.

Until 1991, she explains, North Korea ran on a Soviet style system in which the state promised to provide schooling, health care, and food rations, and the Soviet Union heavily subsidized the bill. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the aid stopped. Park says three million people died on the streets.

The government's answer, as Park describes it, was to save the capital and let the countryside starve. The plan protected the roughly 10 percent of the population living in Pyongyang, the capital, while people in the 13 other districts were left to fend for themselves.

Park says this was deliberate. She says people consumed with finding their next meal could not think about the meaning of life or shooting to the moon.

Pyongyang also refused help from outsiders. As Park describes it, the international community begged to send food, baby formula, and medicine, including through the United Nations, but leader Kim Jong-il refused because he wanted to remain the sole provider, so North Koreans would not learn that relief came from anyone else.

Juche, an ideology whose name means self-reliance, emerged in this period, Park says. She says the regime stopped providing rations and told ordinary people to be self-reliant and find their own way to survive, even though private trading was illegal. As Park puts it, people had to take care of themselves while giving every right to the state.