Saving Lives in North Korea |
Photoraph Source: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen – CC BY-SA 3.0
For everyone who has worked in and around North Korea, Kathi Zellweger has been a role model. As the director of international operations at the Catholic charity Caritas, she oversaw food aid to North Korea in the 1990s when it was overwhelmed by famine. Later, she worked in Pyongyang for the Swiss government on various development projects. When that assignment ended, she continued to remain engaged through an NGO she founded to provide the supplies needed for cataract operations in North Korea. Throughout this challenging work, she remained unfailingly dedicated. Even as other international organizations withdrew from North Korea and the government there put restrictions on those that remained, Zellweger still focused on helping the most vulnerable people.
She also provided, quietly, a steady stream of information about what was going on in one of the most secretive states in the world. When my wife and I worked in Northeast Asia for the American Friends Service Committee, we met with Kathi Zellweger several times at her Hong Kong office and also received her regular clippings of North Korea-related articles. It was such a relief to meet with her. People who work on North Korean issues often fall into two categories: cynical observers or fellow travelers who inexplicably believe in North Korean ideology. Zellweger was neither. She was practical, clear-eyed about the nature of the system, but also hopeful about how outside assistance could improve the lives of everyday North Koreans.
What was once available only to those in Kathi Zellweger’s network is now available to everyone, thanks to a new book, Miss Kathi, that she has written with longtime journalist Mike Chinoy. It chronicles her experiences in North Korea across 75 trips, from her first contact in 1995, just prior to the outbreak of famine, to her last, pre-pandemic visit to the country in December 2019. The book also details her five years of living inside North Korea as a representative of the Swiss government’s official development agency.
The most dramatic descriptions in the book concern the famine years. The North Korean state was reluctant to provide an accurate picture of what was happening inside the country for fear that it would prove the system wasn’t working. Because of a fear of outside military intervention, the government believed that it had to project strength, not weakness.
But North Korea also needed help. The increase in the cost of energy, after both Russia and China stopped providing........