Thursday, February 4, 2010; 9:07 AM
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
SEOUL -- Amid accounts of starvation, food shortages in the army and runaway inflation, senior economic officials in North Korea have been fired in recent days, according to reports in the South Korean media.
The dismissals were reported during a week in which North Korean leader Kim Jong Il made a rare admission of his state's failure to provide citizens with an acceptable standard of living.
"I am most heartbroken by the fact that our people are living on corn," Kim said in a report monitored by Yonhap, the South Korean news agency. "What I must do now is feed them white rice, bread and noodles generously."
Kim made a similar admission in January, mentioning white rice and meat soup. But the likelihood of his being able to improve short-term nutrition in his country seems small.
South Korean officials have said that a poor harvest last fall has set up North Korea for a possible severe food shortage this spring.
North Korea unilaterally canceled an aid agreement last year with the United States that would have delivered 500,000 tons of food. For the past two years, South Korea has refused to deliver large amounts of free food and fertilizer, pending a move by the North to get rid of its nuclear weapons.
These moves have left the U.N. World Food Program and other aid operations in North Korea short of food and have put millions of children and elderly at risk, according to U.N. officials.
The capacity of private markets to supply food in the North has also taken a major hit because of a government-ordered currency revaluation in December. It disrupted market trading, while driving up the price of rice and nearly every other commodity. It also infuriated many North Koreans who saw the value of their cash savings plummet -- and reportedly triggered some riots.
Two people a day have been dying of hunger in South Hamgyong province, according to a report by Good Friends, a Seoul-based aid and human rights group with informants inside the country. It also said that North Korean army commanders met with government officials Jan. 20 to discuss how to obtain more food for troops.
The army, with 1.2 million men and women in uniform, normally has first dibs on food grown in state-owned cooperative farms -- and takes as much as a quarter of the crop before distribution to civilians.
The apparent scapegoat for last year's disastrous currency revaluation is Pak Nam Gi, head of planning and economy for the Workers' Party. He has been fired, according to the Chosun Ilbo, a newspaper in Seoul, which cited sources based in China.
Pak had often traveled with Kim across the country on his inspection of army and industrial sites, but intelligence officials in Seoul have told the South Korea media that Pak "has not been visible for some time now."
South Korea's National Intelligence Service said Thursday that North Korea has now recognized the social upheaval caused by the currency revaluation and is easing curbs on black market trading, Reuters reported.
"To quell public discontent, controls and the crack down on markets places have been eased," an intelligence official told Reuters. "Discontent is high."
The head of "Room 39," the government bureaucracy that focuses on making money for the Kim family, has also been fired, according to Yonhap, citing an unidentified source. It said that Kim Dong Un, head of the department that controls operations ranging from insurance fraud to legitimate trading operations, had been replaced by his deputy.
U.N. sanctions intended to disrupt North Korea's arms and smuggling operations were beefed up last year after the country detonated a nuclear device.
The chief of Room 39 might have lost his job because he had been blacklisted by the European Union and he could no longer travel freely in Europe, Yonhap said.
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