North Korea Makes Aid Requests Without a Hat in Hand

When a German medical aid organization asked to set up a program to rehabilitate decrepit hospitals here, North Korean negotiators demanded a $30,000 fee from the group for the privilege.

The founder of the group balked, saying that it never paid a state for providing assistance. The compromise: The group, German Emergency Doctors, paid the fee with imported rice instead of cash.

Beggars usually can’t be choosers, but North Korea is clearly an exception to that rule. Despite its stature as one of the world’s poorest nations, several international relief organizations say they have had to pay dearly for the privilege of providing food, medical care and agricultural assistance here.

For example, getting a visa for a foreign aid worker to live in this isolationist nation can cost as much as $500,000. The aid groups promise to spend at least that in North Korea in return for credentials, some organizations say.

To establish a local office with two foreign staffers, North Korea demands a minimum spending budget of $3 million, says the German group’s founder, Rupert Neudeck.

“What I appreciate about North Koreans is they come to the table and they want everything,” said Douglas Broderick, country director of the U.N. World Food Program. “And we go from there.”

Audacious Stance on Weapons Programs

Some observers see similar audacious negotiating tactics when it comes to North Korea’s weapons programs. In the eyes of critics, these controversial programs have earned North Korea substantial aid money, recognition and attention. Since 1995, for example, the World Food Program has provided $635 million in food aid to North Korea, much of it donated by the United States.

North Korea received particular attention after it launched a missile in Japan’s direction in 1998, setting off alarm bells in Asia. The U.S. is particularly worried about long-range missiles that the rogue nation could direct toward it.

“The lesson of North Korea is play it hard and you’ll be paid off,” said Nick Eberstadt, a North Korea specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington. “You carve yourself out as an exception, a globalization-busting, peace-busting, good-times nation, and people give you special deals.”

He wonders aloud how long it will be before countries such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran and China begin demanding similar treatment.

“Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il certainly has gotten his share of attention from world leaders. Russian President Vladimir V. Putin jetted in for a visit last summer, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright wined and dined with Kim last month, and even President Clinton is strongly considering a visit in November.

The attention hasn’t gone unnoticed in Pyongyang.

“Why should I go around to industrialized nations?” Kim told South Korean publishers and editors whom he invited to Pyongyang, the capital, in August, according to a transcript of the meeting. “Even if I stay here in Pyongyang, the leaders of the great powers come to visit me.”

A “minder” appointed to watch a journalist noted that many countries are trying to normalize relations with North Korea. “All the Europeans are competing with each other to have good relations with us,” the minder said, “and your country is trying to get good relations with our country too.”

Kim said he offered a deal in which other countries would launch satellites for North Korea if Pyongyang scrapped its missile development program, according to the transcript of the publishers meeting. Putin told world leaders at a summit of industrialized nations in Okinawa, Japan, in July that such an offer had been made, although one South Korean news organization later reported that Kim said he had been joking.

Regime Sees Itself in a Win-Win Situation

Kim apparently perceives that his country is in a win-win situation.

“Certainly it will be a headache for the U.S. because the country will hate to give money freely to us on one hand, and on the other, the U.S. must stem our scientists’ research on satellite technology,” Kim told the media executives.

When it comes to food aid, says the World Food Program’s Broderick, the North Koreans always want more. “ ‘We have to feed our people,’ ” the North Koreans implore, he said. “ ‘We have many hungry people. Help us, help us, help us.’ ”

The North Koreans also point out that they provide the trucks that distribute the wheat flour once it arrives at Nampo port, as well as the fuel and warehouses. The $8-per-ton fee that the WFP pays for the distribution doesn’t cover expenses, Broderick says.

Some aid programs, including Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam, have pulled out of North Korea, complaining that they couldn’t monitor whether aid was getting where it was supposed to go. Other problems cited were excessive bureaucracy and restrictions on travel within areas where the aid was needed.

But the WFP and many others have stayed put because “we believe there’s more to be gained from engagement,” said WFP official David Morton.

Since June, conditions have improved, the aid organizations say. When the WFP arrived in 1995, for example, its staff was confined to a downtown hotel. Now the agency has access to 75% of North Korea’s land and 80% of its population. Some areas are still restricted, presumably because of military operations in those areas concentrated around the borders.

Broderick says he’s sure that the food is being delivered, because he rarely sees starving children as he did two years ago when North Korea’s famine was at its peak.

The North Koreans sometimes ask for the moon, but they also retreat. For example, they initially demanded that journalists accompanying Albright pay $26 a minute for overseas Internet access--which amounts to $1,560 an hour; they wound up reducing it to $6 a minute, a mere $360 an hour.

Moreover, the country has little corruption or crime, and relief workers say they feel safe. Once, a bag of flour fell off a WFP truck and it was returned by the person who found it. Several aid groups say they have seen no evidence that the requested upfront money is going into the pockets of government leaders.

Negotiations are friendly, Neudeck says. “We sometimes disagree with them, but it’s never a bad atmosphere,” he said. “It’s never brutal. It’s never like a police regime, which it is, but it’s not behaving like that.”

Neudeck says he thinks that the aid will go a long way toward changing the attitudes of people in this closed country.

“This is the only country that never depended on foreign help,” he said, noting North Korea’s national mantra of juche, which means self-reliance. “It’s the beginning of the end.”