Criticising US government grants for North Korea is 'ignorant and insulting'

To suggest that those working for change in North Korea are driven solely by money is missing the point, says Christopher Green

Debate: US grants putting people at risk, say experts

A North Korean soldier pictured in the countryside.
'Ordinary North Koreans could benefit from grants.' Photograph: Eric Lafforgue/Barcroft Media

Applications for the latest round of US government grants supporting North Korean projects closed yesterday. Normally these moments pass without a flicker of interest outside some very small circles, but this time the call for proposals by the State Department’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor has attracted harsh public criticism.

Much of the outrage stems from the wording of the call itself, which seeks applications from groups pursuing projects that include:

Promoting access to information into, out of, and within North Korea. Projects can include the production of media, including visual/video content, for DVDs, USBs, and other methods to send information into North Korea. Content should include informative and engaging ways to educate and shape North Korean understanding and attitudes toward human rights and democratic principles.

For good measure, it adds that projects with a strong academic or research component will “not be deemed competitive” while others rooted in health, technology, or science matters will be “discouraged”.

The criticism this has provoked centres on three focal points:

1) That these types of activities (which could involve the carrying of illicit products into North Korea) mean that funding is actively encouraging violations of North Korean law.

2) That funding could be used to facilitate activities that place those who undertake them in danger.

3) That resulting projects will do little to help ordinary North Korean people.

In sum, naysayers feel that the money could end up promoting projects that are not only illegal, but also risky and ultimately quite unhelpful.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Even if one acknowledges that some illegality, danger, and even some unproductive outcomes may result, the fact is that the benefits still far outweigh the risks.

The illegality argument is misguided. It is no exaggeration to say that North Korea is the kind of endemically corrupt place where the person who does not engage in illegality of some sort is at risk of death. A vast and completely incomprehensible litany of activities is forbidden there.

Don’t take my word for it. High-profile defector Jang Jin-sung, visiting a provincial town far from Pyongyang, recalls in his newly published memoir Dear Leader:

The walls on either side of the marketplace entrance were plastered with black-lettered slogans instead of the usual price of goods:

Death by firing squad to those who disobey traffic rules!

Death by firing squad to those who hoard food!

Death by firing squad to those who waste electricity!

Jang continues at length, cataloguing a maddening list of crimes for which the punishment for transgression is no less than death.

Although these crimes do not always result in a firing squad, the point is simple. Many of the people who wish to change the situation in North Korea do so precisely because it is the kind of state that is prepared to make a capital offence out of something as trivial as wasting electricity.

Jang Jin-Sung
Jang Jin-sung, whose book Dear Leader outlines the regime's excesses against its people. Photograph: Sylvia Hui/Associated Press

To imply that those who work toward this kind of change do so simply because they are being paid is both ignorant and insulting. I know this because I meet these people all the time. Most are former citizens of North Korea who left the country and now feel passionately that their countrymen and women deserve to be treated better. Who are we to stop them?

To understand their passion requires us to understand North Korea. Not everyone there lives a terrible life – some are very comfortable indeed, with access to many of the luxuries of modern existence that we take for granted.

This is not in itself rare; inequality is a ubiquitous feature of societies worldwide. It is the causes of the inequality that is the problem.

Since its liberation from Japanese colonial rule at the end of the second world war, the North Korean leadership has sought to systematically discriminate against specific groups. Via a system of social categorisation called songbun, everyone is ranked according to their family’s revolutionary heritage and ancestral loyalty to the Kim family.

A person may influence their songbun categorisation to a limited extent through hard work and overt displays of renewed appreciation for the benevolent rule of the Kim family, but it cannot be completely reversed.

Thus, inequality is enforced from the top down in accordance with historical events that may have taken place before a person was even born. This entrenched system of state discrimination, along with the repression that underpins it, is one driver of the activism in which US-funded groups engage.

And “engagement” is precisely what the groups are doing. To people like me who experienced the “sunshine policy” era, when the South Korean administrations of late presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun provided significant state aid and assistance to North Korea, it is much too easy to fall into the trap of viewing “engagement” as state-to-state, mutually agreed upon dialogue and bilateral projects.

In this framework, engagement certainly does not mean “visual/video content, for DVDs, USBs, and other methods to send information into North Korea”.

The US State Department is not wrong to encourage projects that promote information freedom for other groups in North Korea, even where this carries a risk. It is our understanding of engagement that must change.

Nobody has the right to declare a monopoly on understanding how to best understand or accelerate change in North Korea. Everything must be tried.

There is nothing intrinsically reprehensible about dialogue and economic projects involving the North Korean government. However, such dialogue must be taken for what it is: engagement with a government that does not generally act in the best interests of its people.

At the same time, it is essential to inform and engage all the less privileged strata of North Korean society in a cornucopia of different ways. This is particularly the case for the many who have been eternally disenfranchised by the songbun system, state violence and endemic corruption.

The State Department's Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor is one organisation aiming for that goal.

To deny groups, many led by North Korean citizen activists, access to a competitive funding process would be to deny them the right to try to accelerate flows of information into North Korea. In turn, it would be to deny civilians access to information that both equips them to ask questions about the nature of Kim family rule and to just have fun.

Both are important.

Christopher Green works for Daily NK, which receives funding from a foundation supported by US Congress. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Daily NK