Usually, I wouldn’t be excited to watch the TV screens while tearing away at one of the cardio machines in Yates at seven in the morning. Last week, though, I couldn’t help but look up from the blinking light on my cardio machine to see the latest on Good Morning America’s Diane Sawyer in North Korea. At first, I was amazed how clean and organized the streets of Pyongyang looked, with clean-cut citizens walking around, carrying on as if a blonde lady from the United States strolling about their hometown did not seem all that strange.
Then I quickly snapped back to reality: a reality that is hidden behind the façade of an immaculately organized state where the citizens are seamlessly in line and soldiers march perfectly in step under the supreme direction of Kim Jong Il. This reality is rarely seen and the plight of the North Korean people has become a rallying cry for many global organizations that have decried the North Korean regime’s countless number of human rights violations.
This reality includes the two to three million North Koreans who have died of malnutrition in the past ten years. Since the famine of 1994-1998, nearly a quarter of the nation’s 23 million people still need daily food rations in order to survive. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization nearly 40 percent of children under the age of six are chronically malnourished, and one out of three mothers is anemic and malnourished. Human Rights Watch has reported, though, that both ordinary citizens and military members all suffer from hunger and food shortages. The BBC states that an average citizen living in the city receives 250 grams of cereal from the government and may or may not be able to afford an addition 30 grams of maize. A recommended amount for a healthy individual is almost 600 grams of food.
North Korea faces a particularly acute food crisis this winter because of the severe flooding in the country this summer, as well as cuts to food aid from countries protesting the recent missile tests.
The scope problems in the country are extend beyond mere hunger; citizens accused of being unfaithful to the regime are imprisoned in what many humanitarian experts call concentration camps. The number of prisoners at the twelve largest concentration camps throughout the country could be as many as 200,000 people.
The list of human rights violations only lengthens as the world community slowly puts together the puzzle of what is going inside this secretive country. For example, a United Nations report published just last week cited that the government puts disabled persons in camps known as “Ward 49” where they are categorized and subjected to “harsh and subhuman conditions.”
So, what is going on? Why aren’t these images being shown on our TV monitors and laptop screens?
In early November, the Liberty in North Korea group on campus will show one of the many documentaries shot by brave filmmakers who have and are still crossing the Yalu River from China to give us proof of what has not been shown to the rest of the world. If you are looking for more than the façade we see on TV, come out and educate yourself, then others, then the world.
