Korean Peninsula

Lord Bishop of Hereford Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Hereford]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, for initiating this short debate. I have been able to attend some of the meetings organised by the all-party group, and particularly welcomed the chance in 2011 to meet the Speaker of the North Korean Assembly, Choe Tae Bok, when he visited the United Kingdom as the guest of that all-party group. Among the questions we touched upon during that discussion were the humanitarian situation and the issue of religious freedom, and today I should like to say something about both.

Forty years ago, North Korea’s gross domestic product was twice that of South Korea. Today, North Korea is among the world’s poorest nations while the south is among the richest. Today, the gross domestic product of South Korea is nearly 30 times that of the north—a 60-fold difference. The situation has been aggravated by famine, a series of natural disasters and the near total collapse of the Soviet economies, once the DPRK’s primary market, all of which have, of course, contributed to the country’s abject poverty.

UNICEF DPRK recently published its national nutritional survey. There was one slight encouragement: that malnutrition had dropped by four percentage points since 2009. However, I go on quickly to say that, nevertheless, malnutrition is over 27%. UNICEF’s representative in North Korea, Desiree Jongsma, reminded us of what that statistic means. She said that,

“more than one in every four children remains stunted, hostage to life-long ill-health and reduced educational and career prospects as a result of a lack of much needed proteins, fruits, vegetables and fats, as well as frequent infections due to a lack of both essential medicines and clean water, as well as poor hygiene”.

On average, boys in North Korea are five inches shorter than their South Korean counterparts and weigh 25 pounds less. Malnutrition, of course, leads not only to physical weakness but to intellectual impairment. It leads to a frail population and makes the people especially vulnerable to disease.

When the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, visited North Korea, I understand that they were told by senior DPRK officials that the average citizen receives only a meagre 350 to 400 grams of rice each day, well short of even the regime’s sparse target of 600 grams. However, I understand that the reality in practice is that many see no rice at all, subsisting instead on husky cornmeal. Two million people are estimated to have died during the famine of the 1990s.

In those circumstances, we need to think very carefully about the morality of food being used as a weapon of war or coercion. Surely it can never be right to withhold food from starving people as a way of punishing their leaders. It was a tragedy that the £126 million food programme which the United States had generously decided to put in place last year was literally blown off the agenda by North Korea’s decision to launch a satellite nine months ago. However, the North Korean leadership should also reflect on the morality of spending vast sums on developing a nuclear capability and on maintaining the world’s fourth largest standing army when they cannot feed their own people. That is surely a scandalous and immoral misuse of resources.

The former Leader of your Lordships’ House, the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, said that the situation has been “getting worse year on year”. She continued,

“the most vulnerable people in North Korea are victims of a situation over which they have no control. They are suffering from no fault of their own”.

South Korea’s decision to withhold food aid, supported by the Obama Administration, has inevitably put innocent lives at risk while doing nothing to bring about the end of the conflict between north and south. You cannot starve people into submission and you should never try.

In May 2012, two organisations, Sant’Egidio and Caritas Korea, delivered 25 tonnes of food aid to the DPRK. That was done at the request of Han Tae-song, North Korea’s former ambassador to Rome. That is but a small contribution; nevertheless, it is an act on which we must build. It is not coincidental that those organisations which have been taking in food and medicine have often been inspired to do so by their Christian faith. I think, for instance, of the remarkable American priest, Father Jerry Hammond, who has made more than 40 visits to North Korea, taking in medicines to combat tuberculosis.

Paradoxically, despite that outpouring of practical love, since the 18th century Korea has been the scene of much persecution of Christians. In 1846, Korea’s first ordained Catholic priest, Andrew Kim, was at the age of 25 taken to the Han sands, where he was stripped naked and decapitated; there have been more than 8,000 Catholic martyrs. In 1866, Robert Jermain Thomas, a Welsh missionary, travelled on behalf of the Bible Society to Pyongyang and to the Taedong river, where he was executed. The latest Open Doors World Watch List, published less than two weeks ago, ranks North Korea as the country where Christians are persecuted the most, as has been the case every year since the list was first published in 2002.

Christians are motivated by love, believing that each person is made in the image of God and, because of that, worthy of the utmost respect and elevation of their human dignity. Religious freedom would bring untold blessings to North Korea, not least through the provision of sustained and significant programmes providing for food, education, welfare and health.

Kang Pan Sok, the great-grandmother of Kim Jong-un, was the elder of a Christian church in Pyongyang, so the leadership of that country know from their own story that they have nothing to fear from the Christian faith. It would be a sign of great hope if perhaps, in her memory, her great-grandson could now see the way to opening the path for the church to play its part in building and helping to contribute to a prosperous and peaceful North Korea. Now there is something to hope and pray for.