North Korea Diverts Food Aid to Military

The Korea Times, among others, reports that South Korea's food aid may actually be serving to feed the North Korean military, rather than the North Korean population as a whole:

Some of the rice given to North Korea by South Korea for humanitarian purposes has been funneled into the North Korean military units on the front lines, according to a military source Thursday. But Seoul has never raised the issue with Pyongyang.

``Since late 2006, we have noticed bags of rice clearly marked with South Korea's Red Cross logo being unloaded from trucks in North Korean military camps and some of them were left in a stacked there,'' an official said on condition of anonymity.

The bags, which contained rice, were also used for North Korea's military encampment. So far some 400 rice bags reportedly ended up in the North Korean military bases.

North Korean defectors have often said rice provided to the North by the South leaked to the military. Some even said the good quality rice goes to the military first.

It's an odd cycle, with South Korea feeding the very military that threatens to invade it. There are, however, more sinister implications regarding the regime's motivations. Must read analysis at the blog One Free Korea, which posits, among other things, the possibility that the North Korean regime, when given food aid, cuts back on importing food so as to free up more money to spend on other things while its people sit on the brink of starvation.