NORTH KOREA

Foreign food aid to North Korea under threat to be reduced

Disturbing cases of cannibalism and trade in human flesh during
the great famine of 1996-1997

By Willy Fautr, Human Rights Without Frontiers

For years, the North Korean people has been starved to death by its leader, Kim Jong-il, and the number of victims will certainly remain unknown for ever. What is known however is that the foreign humanitarian aid does not reach the people in need but is diverted to the benefit of the pillars that guarantee the survival of the regime: the army, the police and the nomenklatura. Consequently, most foreign humanitarian agencies have withdrawn from the country. The World Food Program, the U.S., the EU and South Korean churches go on sending food to North Korea but without proper monitoring of its distribution.

As reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), as of beginning of this year only 25% of the food aid requirement for 2002 has been resourced, with only the United States and Republic of Korea confirming contributions. The North Koreean Public Distribution System ration for the first months of this year was 300 grams per person per day, which is less than half the minimum 625 grams recommended by the World Health Organisation. The World Food Program has already alerted that it could not be able to assist all those in need to an adequate donor response to their emergency operation. To what extent will these developments affect the lives of the North Koreans? The famine may get more severe and lead to cases of cannibalism and trade in human flesh similar to those that happened during the great famine of 1996-1997.

Testimonies about such cases were collected by Human Rights Without Frontiers in Japan and in South Korea in February 2002. Such interviews were very difficult to be carried out. Never did the witnesses or relatives of victims mention such cases on their own initiative. They started telling their gruesome stories after one or two hours of questions and answers on other topics and only because the interviewer had asked them if they had known cases of cannibalism. The reading of the few cases listed below is not recommended to tender-hearted people. The decision to publish such data is not motivated by sensationalism but by the concern about what may happen if the current famine is aggravated by wrong humanitarian policies.

Testimonies

Case 1: Driven to mental insanity by famine

Date and place of interview : 12 February 2002, in Seoul (South Korea)

Arrival in South Korea: March 2001

Interviewer: Willy Fautr, Human Rights Without Frontiers

Witness: Lee Young-suk was born on 21 July 1937. Her father died when she was eight and she had to quit school. Then, she was raised in an orphanage until the age of fourteen when she joined the army as a field hospital nurse, after cheating on her age. In 1953, she got married to an army officer. She gave birth to four boys and three girls. In 1960, her husband was discharged from the army and became a miner. She had four sons and three daughters. Her husband died in China in January 1999. On 14 August 1997, she defected with her husband and their five-year old granddaughter to China. On 30 May 2000, the Chinese police arrested her and her granddaughter in Dandong City (China) while they were attempting to find a boat to South Korea. After eight days spent in a Chinese prison, they were repatriated to North Korea with about two hundred North Korean defectors, mostly women.

Place and date of the cannibalism case: July 1996, Wundok district

Testimony: A miner had a 21 year-old son and two daughters (one was married and the other one was 19 years old). His wife had left him long ago and his unmarried children were living with him. One day, the eldest daughter brought back home a sack full of corn powder. The son started to eat as much as he could but his youngest daughter tried to stop him. He fought with her and killed her. He then took pieces of her body and boiled her for a meal. His father was starving and used to have hallucinations. He thought his daughter was a dog and started eating her flesh with his son. When he came back to his senses, he called for his daughter so that she could also eat dogs meat. He was shocked when he realised what he had done. The father and the son collected the bones, put them in a sack and looked for a remote place where they could bury them but they were discovered by the police. The son was executed publicly and the father died before his trial.

Case 2: Two of the witness grandchildren killed to be eaten in a restaurant

Date and place of interview : 12 February 2002, in Seoul (South Korea)

Arrival in South Korea: March 2001

Interviewer: Willy Fautr, Human Rights Without Frontiers

Witness: Lee Young-suk (See above)

Place and date of the cannibalism case: Beginning 1997 in Obong-ni village, Wundok district.

Testimony: In 1996, there were many reports of missing children in Wundok district. Two of Lee Young-suks grandchildren once went to the market with other children. They were very hungry. A man approached them and said "I will give you good food if you come with me". He took them to his home but sent back a skeleton-like one. He waited outside the house with the hope his friends would come out soon but they never came back and the boy became suspicious. He then went to the police station to tell them his friend had disappeared but he had to insist a lot before they took the case seriously. They ambushed the house and waited until the owner came out. The man finally got out of his house in a suspicious manner. He was holding a bucket. The policemen checked what was inside and discovered a boys head and fingers. Inside, they found other childrens heads lying on the floor, including those of her two missing grandchildren. The murderer was keeping a restaurant and used human flesh with his noodles... He was publicly executed.

Case 3: Repeated acts of cannibalism committed by a woman

Place and date of the interview : Tokyo, 8 February 2002

Interviewer: Willy Fautr, Human Rights Without Frontiers

Witness: Lee (*) was born in Japan from a Korean mother and a Japanese father. He was four years old when his parents decided to help North Korea rebuild its economy. In the early 1960s, a mass scale propaganda campaign was developed by Pyongyang to attract back home North Korean immigrants. Tens of thousands of them were lured by false promises made by the regime. Lees parents also realised they had been deceived but it was too late. After 10-year military service, Lee worked as an ordinary clerk in a section of the Workers Party. For him, there was no prospect of promotion because one of his parents was a foreigner. His younger brother decided to flee to China but came back one day to take him and his family out of the country. In July 2001, Lee arrived in Japan.

Place and date of the cases of cannibalism: 1997, somewhere in North Korea (*)

Testimony: In 1997, I got to know of three cases of cannibalism committed by the same woman in a year. I was working at the propaganda unit of the party and I happened to be in the interrogation room of a woman, the only survivor of a family who had practised cannibalism. Her husband was a technical engineer. Their daughter had got divorced and had come back home with her 5 year-old child. One day, he died from famine and they buried him in a local cemetery.

Once they were back home, they started to think of their hunger and of the child that would get rotten in his grave, and they came to the same idea: to dig him up and to eat him. And they did it.

Some time later, the husband and the daughter died but the woman started to think of eating the flesh of other children. Kids began to disappear in the region and the rumor was saying that they had been killed and eaten. This rumor was verified, at least partly, some time later, when the woman was arrested and confessed to three cases of cannibalism. One of them was particularly horrifying.

A neighbour of one of Lees relatives realised at the end of a day that her son was missing. Somebody told her that he had seen him get into a house two blocks further down the road. That place was suspicious because for some time neighbours had heard chopping noises and noticed nice smells of food although there was not anything to eat anywhere. The mother of the missing child immediately called police officers for help. They burst into the suspicious house and discovered a horrifying scene. The head of the missing child was on the floor. His limbs has been cut into pieces and were boiling in a big cooking pot.

The murderer and cannibal was executed.

(*) The real name of the witness and the county where he was living are not mentioned on purpose because he still has family members in North Korea but these data are known to Human Rights Without Frontiers.

Case 4: Human flesh sold at the market

Place and date of the interview : Tokyo, 10 February 2002

Interviewer: Willy Fautr, Human Rights Without Frontiers

Witness: Han Il Soue is a paramedical officer. In the middle of the 1990s, he did some illegal business between South Korea and North Korea C selling clothes he had received from relatives in Japan C and was sent to a labor camp for one year.

Place and date of the cases of cannibalism: 1996, North Hangyon Province.

Testimony: When I was at the medical school, I was asked by the police to identify a piece of meat and to address a report to the prosecutors office. The results of my first analysis were confirmed by my professor: it was human flesh. But where was it coming from?

An 18-year old girl was walking in a remote area and was looking for an isolated house. She met two men who proposed to help her. They took her to a riverside bank and killed her. They took the flesh off her body and asked an old lady, known to be mentally insane, to boil it. As the cooking pot was too small for the quantity of meat, she decided to sell a part of it on the market. That is where she was trapped by the police.

Recommendation

Human Rights Without Frontiers proposes to international humanitarian agencies to hold an international conference on the topic

"What humanitarian policies for the North Korean people?".