FZ: Guy Delisle’s non-fiction comic book Pyongyang was widely reviewed including in the magazine Foreign Affairs. In it, he describes a trip he took to North Korea while working for a French animation company; he depicts the NGOs distributing food in North Korea as helping to prop up the dictatorship. Clearly in your work there’s a compassion for people of both Koreas. How would you respond to the idea that just helping people to eat is just propping up the regime or the argument that the government would fall if people starved?

BC: It’s a fascinating little book and I actually blurbed it for the publisher, but the thing Delisle knows about is animation. Pyongyang has become the top location in the world for getting animated work done at a very cheap cost. They’re considered to be highly professional now and it’s one of the things North Korea makes foreign exchange on.

Guy Delisle is a fine person but he doesn’t know a lot about North Korea. The North Korean leadership is capable of starving millions of its people while staying in power and there’s no indication whatsoever that if we denied food to North Korea and lots of North Koreans died that this will be an effective way to overthrow the regime.

The American Friends Service Committee has done very good work delivering the agricultural aid to North Korea and I have served on their Asia panel for many years. When I talk to them and other NGO workers they are professional people that have devoted their lives to this work. They go around the world and they deal with regimes that they consider to be far worse than North Korea. What they say is that you help the people you can help. It isn’t propping up the regime to feed little children in an orphanage, or even if it is they need to be fed anyway.

I always ask myself, “Is something going to help the North Korean people or hurt them?” If you confront the regime directly you can bet it’s going to hurt them. There was a German human rights activist who tried to organize a boatload of people to get out of North Korea on the model of East Germany, which collapsed because so many East Germans fled to the West or to Czechoslovakia in 1989. His heart was in the right place but I knew that this would come to naught. Sure enough, about half the people on the boat were spies and a number of people got killed and that was the end of that escapade. So one has to take this very seriously and ask the costs and the benefits of bringing aid to people especially if there’s no chance that the regime might be disappearing in the next ten years.

I always tell my students to be comparative. When you study something in itself you often can’t figure it out. According to recent reports from CARITAS, the global Catholic social services organization which operates in North Korea, about 35 or 36 percent of the younger generation there are either wasted, malnourished, stunted, or sometimes all three. That’s truly terrible in a regime that used to feed all of its people very well. But they’re below the average level of the Philippines where decade in and decade out as well as in 2006 about 37 percent of children are wasted, malnourished or stunted. The Philippines were a U.S. colony from 1900-1946 and how do people feel about that? In India about 47 percent of all children under the age of five are considered malnourished. It doesn’t excuse North Korea in any way but it puts it in perspective. What’s truly inexcusable about North Korea is that they can feed everybody because it’s a regime that can penetrate down to every village.

In our country our viewpoint on these things in this country is totally skewed. I don’t in any way mean to excuse the North Korean regime but I do mean to say that there are ways we can influence the North Korean people in a positive manner by providing food and other kinds of aid.

FZ: In your book Korea’s Place in the Sun you mention in passing that in 1985 when future president Kim Dae Jung returned to South Korea you were part of a delegation, which included U.S. officials that escorted him on his return. You state that KCIA (the informal name for South Korea’s Agency for National Security Planning, also known as the ANSP, a spy agency modeled after the Soviet KGB) agents disrupted the delegation and abducted the South Korean leader. What was the U.S. response when Americans were attacked by South Korea’s intelligence agency?

BC: When the Chun Doo Hwan regime came to power in a coup in 1980 Kim Dae Jung was sentenced to death for his participation in the Kwangju rebellion, which he actually had very little to do with. The Carter administration and the incoming Reagan administration intervened to save his life. Kim Dae Jung was able to come to the United States as an exile and spent much of that time at Harvard writing a book.

He decided to return to South Korean in 1985 and because Filipino leader Benigno Aquino had recently been murdered on the tarmac at Manila airport after he returned from exile at Harvard, Kim Dae Jung got a delegation of people, including Robert White, who had been a U.S. ambassador in El Salvador, to protect him and draw attention to his return. It seemed unlikely the South Korean regime would murder Kim Dae Jung but you never know. Because I had known him since 1973 when I was a graduate student, I joined the delegation.

When we got off the 747 at the airport, a bunch of thugs in brown leather jackets separated us from Kim Dae Jung and his wife. They knocked us around and threw one of the women in our delegation to the floor. They took him away from us and we really didn’t know what had happened to him for about 24 hours. This caused quite a scandal and it was on the world news for a few days. The KCIA, I suppose, had certainly ordered this.