Text Fwd: Obama urged to resume food aid to North Korea: NGO

* Yonhap News
Politics/Diplomacy
2009/10/07 04:14 KST
Obama urged to resume food aid to North Korea: NGO
By Hwang Doo-hyong

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 (Yonhap) -- An Asian women's rights group Tuesday called on the Barack Obama administration to immediately resume humanitarian aid to North Korea to help relieve a food shortage for children, women and others in the impoverished communist state.

The Northeast Asian Women's Peace Conference made the policy recommendations to the Obama administration in a session held at George Washington University here.

Scores of women activists from South Korea, the U.S., China, Japan and Russia also advised the U.S. to come up with a comprehensive system to address North Korea's human rights lapses.

Among the participants are former South Korean Prime Minister Han Myung-sook, Cora Weiss, president of the Hague Appeal for Peace, Sun Jisheng, dean of the Department of English and International Studies of China Foreign Affairs University, Karen Jacob, chairwoman of Women's Action for New Directions, and Lebedeva Nina Boresovna, a member of the Women's Union of Russia.

"Without mutual trust, North Korea tends to construe international criticism of its human rights condition to criticism of its regime," the policy recommendation statement said. "Therefore, the Obama administration needs a comprehensive system to enhance mutual trust, improve bilateral ties and establish a peace mechanism on the Korean Peninsula as well as human rights improvement."

Humanitarian food aid to North Korea by the U.S. was suspended in March, when the North Korean government expelled officials of foreign nongovernmental organizations amid escalating tensions over the North's rocket launch.

The World Food Program has said that North Korea will need more than 800,000 tons of food aid from abroad to feed its 24 million people this year.

South Korea's conservative Lee Myung-bak government has provided no food aid to North Korea, demanding as a quid pro quo that the North make progress in the six-party talks on dismantling its nuclear weapons programs.

Over the past decade, Lee's liberal predecessors each year shipped about 400,000 tons of food and as much fertilizer to North Korea despite the regime's nuclear ambitions.

The U.S., which had provided more than 2 million tons of food aid to the North in the past decade or so, also suspended food aid in March when North Korea refused to issue visas to Korean-speaking monitors, whose mission was to assure that the food aid was not being funneled to the military and government elite.

The U.S. had delivered 169,000 tons of food to North Korea until March from May last year, when Washington pledged to provide 500,000 tons of food to help alleviate the North's chronic food shortage.

Amid thawing relations with the North after months of provocations earlier this year, the U.S. appears ready to resume food aid as a group of North Korean officials visited Los Angeles in August to meet with U.S. relief organizations.

The women's forum, organized a few years ago to make women's voices heard in the six-party talks on ending North Korea's nuclear ambitions, also suggested that the Obama administration restart a dialogue with North Korea both bilaterally and multilaterally to make a breakthrough in the six-party talks, stalled over U.N. sanctions for the North's nuclear and missile tests earlier this year.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il Monday hinted that the North will rejoin the six-party talks depending on the outcome of bilateral talks with the U.S., which has said it will consider engaging the North bilaterally to coax the regime back to the six-party talks.

U.S. officials see the North's conciliatory gestures as the result of the U.N. sanctions taking effect.

The women's forum, however, said any sanctions on North Korea have just created "a vicious circle of conflicts" and demanded the U.S. lift sanctions and help the North join international financial institutions to help revive its struggling economy.

The forum also called on the U.S. government to eventually eliminate its own nuclear arsenal as an example to North Korea.

hdh@yna.co.kr