North Korea Cuts Off More U.N. Relief as Nation Starves

Tuesday , July 07, 2009

By George Russell

Alongside its military posturing, North Korea's bellicose dictatorship is continuing to put new restrictions on United Nations relief organizations operating in the country, which are the main lifeline for its starving population — a fact that apparently leaves the Kim Jong Il regime unmoved.

A spokesman for the World Food program has confirmed to FOX News that on July 3, the emergency relief organization was ordered to limit food deliveries to 57 of the 131 North Korean counties it previously served. At the same time, the agency was told that it must give seven days' notice of visits to oversee food deliveries at all of its relief sites — a sharp change from the one-day notice previously required under a deal to retain U.S. support for North Korean relief efforts. As a result, the spokesman said, WFP is "reviewing the current terms and conditions for our work" in North Korea, "to ensure that our work and our accountability is not compromised."

Additional constraints were also slapped on the child relief organization UNICEF in June, according to a spokesman, Chris de Bono. He told FOX News that the regime banned UNICEF from operating in its northerly Ryanggan province, which borders China, and is one of the impoverished country's poorest areas. UNICEF still operates in 56 other counties across North Korea.

The restrictions make even more dire the food situation in a country where starvation and malnutrition are widespread, even as the Kim regime continues to set off atomic blasts and fire missiles in the direction of Japan and Hawaii.

Furthermore, they once again raise questions about the U.N.'s ability to monitor whatever relief activities that remain in the country. UNICEF's spokesman told FOX News that only WFP had won the right to 24-hour notification for inspection visits, and that all other U.N. institutions in North Korea have operated with the one-week request limit as a matter of course.

UNICEF has ten international staff and 20 local staffers in North Korea. None of the international staff speak Korean. The agency is budgeted to spend $13 million a year on North Korean operations, principally on food for infants, children and pregnant women, along with emergency vaccination programs, essential medicines and clean water supplies.

But nowhere near that amount of money from international donors is currently available. According to its Web site, UNICEF has received only 10 percent of the total, or about $1.3 million, undoubtedly a result of the North Korean regime's aggressive pursuit of nuclear weapons. Unless more money is received soon, the UNICEF spokesman said, "it will be difficult to maintain the current level of operations and this will have serious negative consequences for children and other vulnerable people."

The same funding shortfall applies to the World Food Program, which told FOX News a month ago that donor nations had provided only $75.4 million toward a 2009 goal of $503 million for North Korea, with more than half of that amount — $38.8 million — food aid that was not delivered in 2008.

The only other U.N. agency that has significant operations in North Korea, the United Nations Population Fund, reports that it has received no curtailment in its activities, but it only operates in 11 North Korean counties. It was slated to spend roughly $8.3 million in North Korea between 2007 and 2009, chiefly for birth control and other forms of "reproductive health" and for helping the regime collect population statistics.

Nonetheless, a big question mark still hangs over the North Korean operations of the United Nations Development Program, the U.N.'s major anti-poverty agency, which suspended operations in North Korea in 2007 in the wake of revelations from an independent inquiry that it had wrongfully provided millions in hard currency to the North Korean regime, ignored U.N. Security Council sanctions in passing on dual-use equipment that could conceivably be used in the country's nuclear program, and allowed North Korean government employees to fill key positions.

• Click here to read the FOX News story on the report.

The North Korea case also led to a major crisis of the United Nations' whistleblower protection system, after UNDP refused to follow the recommendations of the U.N.'s chief ethics officer, Robert Benson, and pay a penalty for violating the rights of a UNDP whistleblower who brought UNDP's North Korean rulebreaking to light. UNDP has not changed its position.

• Click here to read the story on the ethics office decision.

UNDP's governing executive board voted last January to allow the agency to return to North Korea, providing that it corrected its previous abuses and win North Korean agreement. A UNICEF spokesman was quoted last month as saying that two UNDP staffers were in Pyongyang, working on reopening UNDP's office.

Queried by FOX News, a UNDP spokesman revealed that one UNDP staffer was currently in North Korea "in temporary premises." The main focus of UNDP activity was indeed on renovating its office building, which "is in a state of disrepair following two years of non-use."

UNDP's actual operations in North Korea, however, "have yet to resume," the spokesman said. "We are monitoring the situation carefully," he added. "Full operational capability is not expected for some time to come."

That said, the spokesman underlined that the latest Security Council resolutions imposing additional sanctions on North Korea for its nuclear brinkmanship "exempts humanitarian and developmental activities which affect civilian populations."

George Russell is executive editor of FOX News.

The Store Next Door: Volunteer Service and the Small Business

Last week, First Lady Michelle Obama addressed the National Volunteer and Community Service Conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, there kicking off the President’s ambitious new service program, United We Serve. The initiative, conceived as a grassroots antidote to the devastating effects of the economic downturn, is a twelve-week long nationwide enterprise designed to muster support for existing volunteer organizations, and assist in the creation of new ones.

In a modern touch, conference organizers in San Francisco launched a tech-savvy effort to transmit the proceedings to the public via Twitter feeds, webcasts and site links. As a result, I received live, real-time web updates, enabling me to follow the event, even stream Michelle’s remarks and various other presentations at the conference.

Prior to her keynote address, however, the First Lady - joined by Maria Shriver and a host of other generous volunteers - spent much of the morning assisting the construction of a new playground at nearby Bret Harte Elementary School in Bayview-Hunters Point, a historically underprivileged neighborhood of San Francisco.

And the effort didn’t end with that playground, or even the completion of the conference. Reports pouring out from the event have kept myself and a motivated web community appraised of the evolving impact of the President’s initiative. The most recent dispatch came from MyImpact.org, whose blog outlined the major themes of the conference. One in particular caught my attention: the notion that service is not only the domain of government and non-profits, rather a product of cross-pollination with the private sector.

To be certain, the vast majority of last week’s conference participants came from the ranks of government sectors and non-profits, but the conference also featured a CEO roundtable in which corporate businesses expressed the value of employee volunteerism in their philanthropy strategies. And it’s easy to understand why organizers invited these high-profile CEOs to participate: they lend a splash of heightened visibility to the event. It’s also simple to see why corporations might find the opportunity attractive: the investment of time and energy pays a sunny PR dividend.

Yet to my eye, one question remains – why weren’t small business leaders included?

Indeed, businesses of every size have unique resources when it comes to solving local problems. Small businesses account for 70% of the work force, providing the largest pool of volunteers for just this sort of community-level initiative. To boot, they often possess a more direct connection to their employees, more easily engaging a greater percentage of them in the volunteer effort. They are more versed in and more impacted by local needs, and can better identify and tackle urgent causes. Most importantly, small businesses are… well, small, and often steered by a tighter, more compact and unilateral management structure. As a result, they are more nimble, quicker to allocate resources and manpower.

And yet this group has not been utilized as a potent force for social change. Still, if the program was conceived as a dynamic, constantly evolving effort, predicated on individual and local involvement, why not encourage your neighboring small businesses to dig in?

Chris Golden of MyImpact.Org has the details:

“Service got a lot of attention this week, but it is an imperative that the news and attention does not stop now. There are just over 11 weeks remaining in the United We Serve initiative. Organizations can register their projects at Serve.gov. Volunteers can search for opportunities there, on a database powered by allforgood.org. And those wanting to connect with others, share stories and best practices, and inspire others to become involved can create a profile at United.MyImpact.org.”

It’s time to widen the effort to include small business. As leading entrepreneurs, they can provide unique innovation not just to local economic growth, but also toward community projects. Michelle Obama and Maria Shriver can’t publicize every playground construction project, so all across America, non-profits and corporate volunteers are chipping in to build up empty sand lots like the one in San Francisco. They should rightly be recognized. But let’s not forget the nearest neighbor, the small business right next door.

by Lalia Helmer and Blair Kroeber