The United Nations is planning a donor’s meeting Friday to rush aid to flood-hit North Korea. The first item on their agenda, as I suggested in the post below, ought to be a demand that North Korea’s Kim Jong Il lead the way by sharing his hoard of ready cash with the flood victims. After all, the U.S. recently arranged the transfer of $25 million in hard currency to Kim, thawed out at Banco Delta Asia with the U.S. State Department and Treasury telling us it would go for humanitarian uses. What better than to help North Koreans recover from floods which according to Kim’s own state media are the emergency of the hour?
Let’s break that down a bit further. Based on North Korean numbers, the UN is telling us there are some 300,000 flood victims, and some 58,000 houses destroyed. If Kim were to hand out his $25 million in hard currency for the clearly humanitarian purpose of helping these people, that alone would come to about $83 per person, or more than $430 per household.
That would be a small fortune for most North Koreans, especially if given in hard cash. And if Kim is asking for help in good faith, he should have no problem giving these people access to world markets, to buy not what he thinks they need, or what UN relief agencies think they need, but what they think they need.
Of course, this is whistling in the wind. The UN specializes in handing out other people’s money, and Kim specializes in finding ways to divert it to his own uses. But if you want a test of the good faith involved in this latest rush to send relief to North Korea, keep an ear out for whether any official — whether from the UN, the U.S., or, say, the sanctimonious climes of Scandinavia — breathes a word about Kim’s $25 million, and why Kim ought to be first in line to help his own countrymen, not by shaking down the global aid establishment yet again, but by handing out by the fistful his hoard of ill-gotten cash.
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