The most comprehensive study to date on health in North Korea has accused the regime in Pyongyang of being indifferent to the fate of its children in its haste to develop nuclear missiles and other weapons.
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The result of nearly 30 years of research, the report details the fine line that children in the North walk between life and death, as well as the human rights violations they face due to the state's prioritization policies.
The report, “Lost Generation: The Health and Human Rights of North Korean Children 1990-2018,” was released in Washington on Friday and focuses on those who survived - albeit traumatized - what is euphemistically known in the North as the “Arduous March” .
Between 1994 and 1998, some estimates suggest that 3.5 million people in a nation of 22.5 million starved to death due to a combination of chronic economic mismanagement, natural disasters and a sharp reduction in financial and food assistance caused by the collapse of allied countries in the Soviet bloc.
Authored by W. Courtland Robinson, an associate professor in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, and published by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), the release of the report was timed to coincide with the 15th anniversary of the signing into US law of the North Korean Human Rights Act.
This is an extremely important report because it demonstrates that the modus operandi of the North Korean regime is regime survival at any cost,” said Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of HRNK.
“The allocation of resources is focused solely on regime survival, with a lot of money being spent on ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons and the military at the expense of the human security of the people and their human rights,” The Telegraph told.
“A lot has been said since the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in 2018 about assistance for the economic development of the North in exchange for the regime's nuclear weapons, but we believe that there can be no development without dramatic improvements in the human rights situation in the North “Scarlatoiu said.
“And that is especially important for the most vulnerable in the North, the children.”
The study focuses primarily on the impact that the famine had on children, identifying patterns of mortality, causes of death, nutrition levels and food security, as well as physical and mental health. One finding of the report is that rations provided by the state to each household per month fell from 12.7 kg in 1995 to just 5 kg in 1998.