UN, NGOs to help flood-ravaged North Korea

More than 44,000 people have been displaced by flooding that ravaged northeastern parts of North Korea earlier this week. Representatives of international aid organisations and UN agencies are currently taking part in a mission led by the North Korean government to assess the damage.

North Korean residents in a showcase village in the demilitarised zone make preparations for farming on April 23, 2013. KIM JAE-HWAN / AFP

But the aid relationship between international organisations and this secretive state is complicated.

Floods swept the northeastern part of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) earlier this week after Typhoon Lionrock triggered heavy rains. The Tumen river, which flows along the DPRK’s border with China and Russia, burst its banks.

At least 60 people are thought to have died and 44,000 were displaced, according to data shared by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA). Roughly 4,400 buildings were destroyed and the same number were seriously damaged.

Patrick Fuller, a spokesperson for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Asia Pacific (IFRC), says the on-the-ground staff saw about 300 milliliters of rain fall in a few days.

“The main concern really is getting relief to people who’ve had to leave their homes”, Fuller said. It is going to be months of work and we are obviously heading into the winter, when temperatures in this area can drop down to minus 30 degrees.”

Fuller said that the IFRC, working with the DPRK Red Cross, was able to move in pre-positioned relief supplies, helping 20,000 people in a week.

The IFRC had supplies on stock because it has been operating on the ground in North Korea for 15 years. It might seem surprising, but some international relief organisations actually have an established presence in North Korea.

“Until the mid 1990s, North Korea didn’t have any aid from the world community or the west,” said Aidan Foster-Carter, an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Leeds University and an avid Korea watcher. “But then, they had a very, very severe famine and they had no option but to make an appeal.”

He said that UN agencies as well as international relief organisations have been providing aid in North Korea ever since.

“The World Food Programme at one time had its largest operation anywhere in the world in North Korea--that might surprise people,” Foster-Carter said.

This testifies to the immense need within the DPRK. An estimated 80% of North Korean households are food insecure and dependent on the national food distribution system, according to the IFRC. About 10 million people are undernourished.

To top it off, Fuller of the IFRC also calls the country “disaster-prone”.

“In the past fifteen years, we’ve seen about three droughts and eight severe floods,” he said.

Aside from humanitarian concerns, Foster-Carter says that UN bodies are obligated to provide relief to the North Korean people, as the DPRK is a member state. However, the aid relationship is complicated.

“North Korea is, in most other respects, a very secretive regime and, while it defies the United Nations Security Council on issues like weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and ballistic missile testing, it is perfectly happy to receive aid,” Foster-Carter said. “But there’s always controversy about where the food aid goes.”

However, Carter-Foster said that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the aid relationship has its ups and downs.

“The fact that the North Korean government is a very controlling government and it doesn’t like having foreigners around means that there are fewer than before,” he said. “The volumes of aid have gone down because of donor fatigue because the DPRK is so difficult to work with.”

The floods this year have been particularly bad, but they are an annual occurrence in the DPRK. That means this probably won’t be the last time international bodies have to bail North Korea out.