Travelers From N. Korea Recount Horrors of Famine

TUMEN, China —  On the Chinese side of the broad river here is a boomtown with bright lights, tall cranes and gleaming new buildings springing up amid open sewers and shacks. On the other bank is the North Korean city of Namyang, where factories are shut, water service is sporadic and on a recent night only three tiny lights could be seen twinkling.

Chinese visitors are crossing the long bridge that links the hermetic hell of North Korea with this well-fed town. Horrified, they are returning with tales of a hunger far more harrowing than anything Western aid workers have been permitted to observe on carefully supervised visits to North Korea.

And in a rare, dangerous breach of the Stalinist nation’s steely code of silence, a recently arrived North Korean woman offered a brutal affirmation of the famine in her country, telling of winter mornings when she passed corpses of children who had died of hunger and cold in the streets.

Her weathered face streamed with tears as she told of families committing suicide, parents splitting up to scour the countryside for food, and abandoned children begging in railroad stations--even in the showplace capital city of Pyongyang.

The North Korean government’s admission that 134 children have died of malnutrition is “a total lie,” she declared. Instead, she said, North Koreans believe that at least 100,000 people have perished since 1995 of malnutrition, cold and lack of medicine, though this is a number that cannot be confirmed.

She told of trading away precious quilts for food and spending evenings guarding her few remaining belongings against famished thieves and marauding soldiers. She said that any notion of egalitarian unity in North Korea has been shattered because hungry workers and soldiers have seen Communist Party elites and military officers divert foreign rice for themselves while giving the workers imported animal fodder.

“In the past we never complained, but now it is different,” she said. “Among your friends, you criticize the government, and even in public people criticize, because even the security people have not gotten a distribution [of food] since last year.”

But while the bitterness and grumbling is growing in North Korea, dictator Kim Jong Il and his regime face no threat to their control, the woman and others said in interviews conducted this week in two cities in northeastern China, a region heavily populated by ethnic Koreans.

Her view of the regime’s stability in isolated North Korea was supported by another North Korean woman, Chinese businessmen and relatives who have recently returned from North Korea. “I doubt they will rebel before they all starve,” one visitor concluded.

On Monday, a Chinese Korean family returned home, walking across the bridge to China from Namyang, after delivering rice and money to relatives.

“When I visited them three years ago, they had rice, if not much,” the Chinese Korean man said. “This time, oh, it is hell! There is no describing their misery.”

His wife said she was so shocked that she gave away everything she had--even the spare underwear she had brought.

Conditions in Namyang, though, are believed to be among the best in North Korea thanks to handouts from relatives in China. But factories there have shut down for lack of fuel and homes are supplied with running water for only one hour a day, the family said. No rations have been distributed for a year, and the population of about 3,000 is surviving on corn porridge. “We couldn’t eat it,” the man said. “It was fit only for pigs.”

It took his relatives six days to travel the few hundred miles from their home to Namyang to meet them, since there is insufficient fuel to run the coal-fired trains. “There is no coal because the miners cannot mine it. They’re too hungry,” he said.

But coal miners are supposed to get more food than anyone else. In contrast, the ration for college students in Pyongyang is just 16 kernels of corn per day, the North Korean woman said. “People have been eating wild plants and tree bark for several years now,” she said.

Still, the woman vowed to return home soon. So did another North Korean woman, who arrived in China last summer--before the worst famine--looking like “a living skeleton,” according to the relative who bribed a North Korean official $300 to let her out.

While acknowledging starvation, she defended Kim’s government against the angry complaints of her appalled, disbelieving relatives. “If only we had a big harvest, we would have no worries,” she said.

Although both women were anxious that the world hear of North Korea’s plight, they asked that their names, hometowns and other identifying details not be given, because hunger and chaos have done nothing to lessen the draconian rule in their native land.

“If they find out I have talked, 10 generations of my family will be punished,” the outspoken woman said.

Traitors--meaning anyone who criticizes the government to foreigners--can expect their great-grandparents, grandparents, spouses, children and grandchildren, and all their spouse’s relatives, to be sent to coal mines or concentration camps, she explained.

Both women, rather than finding the main fault with their government, blamed a U.S.-led trade embargo for strangling their nation and causing its suffering.

And both said that North Koreans long to make war on those who they believe are persecuting them. “Everyone, including me, is wondering why our dear leader Kim Jong Il is sitting idle while we are going hungry,” said the government supporter. “It is all because of the isolation policy of outsiders. We can either starve to death or we can die fighting. . . . We should fight.”

“People do want war,” agreed the other woman, who said she felt the same way until she saw Yanji, a flourishing Chinese city of 300,000 located 37 miles west of Tumen.

Fifteen years ago, the people of Yanji were forbidden to own motorized bicycles. Now they have so much more--half own their own apartments and some even have Land Rovers.

But what amazed the North Korean visitor most was the communications system that lets provincial Chinese telephone anywhere in the world. “I have seen since I came here that rich countries do not want war, because they have too much to lose and do not want to sacrifice,” she said.

Her comrade, though, said Yanji made her uneasy: “So they have more material things, so what? This is a very unstable society. In North Korea, you are always guaranteed a job. You don’t have to worry.”

The women, relatives and businessmen also told of these things, reports that could not be confirmed:

* The official government distribution of food now amounts to less than 100 grams per person per day--less than one-fourth the daily adult requirement. But many areas have received no food at all for a year. Some people got rations of cattle feed that made many of them quite ill.

* Officials systematically try to conceal the source of foreign aid. Last year, a South Korean ship bearing 100,000 tons of rice was forced to remove its flag when it entered Nampo harbor. North Korean workers who unloaded the vessel received new clothes and shoes for the first time in years and were told the rice was from Taiwan. They learned the truth only when they overheard crew members speaking Korean.

* Ordinary North Koreans have not seen “a single grain” of rice sent by the United Nations--which this month pledged $126 million in new aid to North Korea, enough to feed some 3.5 million famine victims--and other groups. “It has all been taken away to the military or to Pyongyang,” one of the women said.

* North Koreans began dying in large numbers in 1995. Thousands succumbed to heat and malnutrition in the month of mourning that followed Kim Il Sung’s death in July 1995, when no food was distributed to a malnourished populace. A cholera epidemic then killed even more people. This winter, at least 20,000 people are believed to have starved to death in remote coal-mining regions alone.

* Soldiers, who long have knocked on strangers’ doors at night asking for meals, now are digging up potatoes from fields, looting homes and snatching supplies from markets. Most North Koreans have accepted the idea of preferential allocations for the army, since their sons must serve for seven years. But lately only the officers are getting fed.

Meantime, North Koreans have begun sneaking across the river into China to beg for food, risking being shot on sight.

This winter, five or six young men “dressed like beggars” paid nocturnal visits to the riverside village of Paek Ryong alone, said a family of Korean Chinese farmers. “We cannot possibly refuse them, because as far as food is concerned, we have plenty,” said farm wife Choi Soon Ok.

Indeed, for the Chinese, even in remote Tumen, these are good times. Here, modern apartments sprout next to shacks. Customers riding in rickshaws chat away on mobile telephones.

The contrast between life in North Korea and China could not be greater--and the dire situation across the river only emphasizes this.

Last weekend, for example, Tumen was filled with anxious South Koreans and Chinese trying desperately to get food or messages to their North Korean relatives.

There were also a surprising number of tourists here who had come to peer across the river through the binoculars and telescopes that vendors helpfully provide for 20 cents a peek.

On Monday morning, at least 100 North Koreans could be seen waiting for food to arrive. Some lounged in the central square of Namyang, under a huge portrait of the late Kim Il Sung. Others sat hunched, simply staring back across the river.

Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.