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SEOUL: Communist North Korea, which announced Monday that it had conducted its first nuclear test, is a hermit regime whose guiding philosophy is “juche” or self-reliance — yet for years it has been unable to feed its own people.
Only last month the World Food Programme launched an urgent appeal for more emergency funds, saying that more than one third of the nation's children are badly malnourished.
North Korea suffered famine for several years starting in 1995 which killed hundreds of thousands of people and left survivors subsisting on leaves, tree bark and whatever else they could glean.
Floods, followed by drought and tidal waves, were partly responsible, but analysts mostly blame the collectivist agricultural system and inefficient distribution network.
Given this history of hardship in a nation of some 23 million, the regime's plans to test a nuclear weapon might not — or should not — seem a priority.
But the North, with a half-century of unrelenting hostility to Washington, blames what it calls US threats to attack it and weaken it through sanctions for its stated intention to detonate an atom bomb in a test.
The nation, slightly smaller than Mississippi, came into being just before the defeat of Japanese colonisers in World War II.
Two US Army officers, using a National Geographic map for reference, hastily proposed dividing the peninsula along the 38th parallel between US and Soviet zones of influence.
The nations of North and South Korea were proclaimed in 1948 and two years later the North's first leader Kim Il-Sung launched an invasion of the South.
The three-year war left some three million Koreans dead, wounded or missing and the peninsula permanently divided.
Kim, known as the Great Leader, fostered a personality cult bordering on idolatry, with harsh punishment for any dissent.
In the late 1980s, according to one report, there were at least 34,000 monuments to him — excluding benches where he once sat, which were covered with protective glass.
He died in 1994 and was succeeded by his son Kim Jong-Il, but officially remains president for eternity inside his mausoleum.
The younger Kim took over leadership of the ruling party in 1997 after a three-year mourning period, amid acute economic difficulties.
The economy, already burdened by the cost of shoring up the world's fourth largest military force, shrank that year for the eighth successive year since the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, its former benefactor.
Kim opened the reclusive state to some degree, including a landmark summit with South Korea in 2000.
Two years later the regime introduced limited reforms to the centralised command economy, allowing some flexibility in state-set prices and granting incentives to workplaces and workers.
But in October 2005, in a possible sign of its determination to hang on to control, it banned private grain sales and announced a return to centralised food rationing.
At the end of 2005 the North suspended the World Food Programme's 10-year emergency programme and severely curtailed its activities. Food aid now comes mainly from China and South Korea and energy from China.
Outside the capital Pyongyang, where the elite and other privileged classes largely live, life remains harsh. A US State Department report said the nation “continues to suffer chronic food shortages and malnutrition.”
Some reports say the regime's iron grip is being loosened somewhat by the smuggling of radios, DVD players and South Korean DVDs from China. Radios sold inside the country are sealed so only official channels can be listened to.
One analyst believes any nuclear test may be aimed at rallying the public.
“There is the possibility of famine returning this winter if international assistance is not maintained,” said Peter Beck, Northeast Asia director of the International Crisis Group.
He said: “It may be a way of rallying people at a time when they are having to tighten their belts.”
North Korea's human rights record is also abysmally poor, the US State Department noted in its annual report last year. “The regime continued to commit numerous serious abuses,” it said.
It cited extrajudicial killings, disappearances and arbitrary detention including many political prisoners; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; torture, forced abortions and infanticide in prisons; severe punishment of some repatriated refugees: the absence of freedom of speech or religion and “government attempts to control all information.”
