The last two centuries of Korean history have been marked with isolation, annexation, conquest, freedom and civil war. 1910 became one of the darkest years in Korean history, as Korea was officially annexed into Japan as a Japanese colony. With the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and the United States divided Korea into two protectorates along the 38th parallel: the North under the Soviet Union and the South under American control. In 1948, the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea (DPRK) was established in the North with Kim Il Sung as President. In the same year, the Republic of Korea (ROK) was established as well.

North Korea: Brief History from 1948 – 1994

Two years after the establishment of both Koreas, Kim Il Sung launched an attack on the ROK to unify the two Koreas into one nation under his rule. The ensuing three years of fighting was inconclusive, and the two Koreas have remained separated since an armistice was declared on July 27, 1953. Interestingly, the DPRK was in fact more economically prosperous than the ROK until the 1970’s. This is because the Japanese had concentrated much of its industrial production in North Korea and used the ROK as a “bread basket.”

Due to economic mismanagement, the DPRK’s economy slowly went into decline after the 1970’s. However, the biggest external shocks to the DPRK came after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of aid from the defunct country. Since then, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has become the DPRK’s chief economic benefactor and trading partner.

The Famine

North Korea had always been dependant on a central food distribution system. The regime has historically discouraged the development of alternative means of food security, such as local markets. However, the combination of central mismanagement and natural disasters led to one of the worst humanitarian crises the world has ever seen.

As evidenced by North Korea experts such as Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland, North Korea was already experiencing famine-like symptoms in the early 1990’s. However, when heavy rains hit the DPRK in the mid-1990’s, countless numbers of people perished during the famine. The estimates vary on how many people actually died during the famine: academic studies have put the figure anywhere between 600,000 to 3.5 million people dead. The widely accepted estimates range from 1 million to 2 million dead, or approximately 5 to 10% of the total DPRK population. In other words, this meant that a population equal to the city of Ottawa would have simply disappeared.

How did this famine happen? Pyongyang claims it was a victim of natural disasters. However, a closer examination of the famine finds that several actions by the regime could have mitigated this catastrophe.

A substantial percentage of the population did not have access to food during the famine. The populations in the isolated northwest as well as in urban centres around the western coastal city of Hamhung were the hardest hit in the famine. This was because the populations there relied solely upon the only source of food in those regions: the central food distribution system. When the central system collapsed, the populations did not have access to food. Although there is no evidence these areas were deliberately cut off from food supplies, one can argue that a certain form of “triage” occurred where the North Korean regime prioritized food distribution in certain regions over others, the criteria in most cases being political loyalty. Cities like Pyongyang, where the most loyal class of citizens reside, were most likely prioritized over regions such as North Hamkyung province, where many of those suspected to be disloyal to the regime, or the “hostile” class, reside. Furthermore, for the first two years of the famine, North Korea did not request emergency food aid from the international community; rather Pyongyang chose to wait until the worst of the famine was over.

This is where the refugee story starts.