In a league of its own

SOME governments are worse than others. And then there's North Korea's. Not only does it run the country as a vast gulag. Not only has it so mismanaged its economy that probably millions do not have enough to eat. It also spreads mischief internationally. North Korea has not so much a foreign policy, more a criminal record. It covers terrorist mass-murder, nuclear proliferation, large-scale kidnapping, arms- and drug-smuggling, counterfeiting and even shoplifting. It seems lunatic to think the outside world can do serious business with such a regime. Yet it has no choice, for two reasons: North Korea is a nuclear menace; and some of its people risk starvation.

In recent days, fresh evidence has emerged of North Korea's criminality. China has blocked publication of a report on North Korea's proliferation activities for the UN Security Council. But it has leaked anyway. It accuses North Korea of the transfer of “prohibited ballistic-missile related items” to Iran on regular scheduled flights. Despite a supposedly rigorous international regime designed to prevent this kind of traffic, North Korea is plausibly accused of carrying it on. It has precious few other sources of revenue; and risking yet further sanctions probably seems a gamble worth taking.

North Korea has also just been caught busting some other UN sanctions, including the arms embargo imposed in December 2009 on Eritrea. A ship carrying $15m-worth of rockets, surface-to-air missiles and explosives recently intercepted in the Indian Ocean was on its way to Eritrea from North Korea.

Unusually, North Korea did, in 2002, admit its past guilt in one sort of heinous crime: the abduction of 13 Japanese citizens to teach North Korea's spies Japanese and help them assume false identities. The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a lobby group in Washington, DC, claims that the total number stranded in North Korea is huge: 180,000. The astonishing figure includes 83,000 South Koreans captured during the Korean war of 1950-53, and 93,000 ethnic-Korean residents of Japan who ended up in North Korea, unable to leave. But it also covers nearly 4,000 more kidnapped South Koreans, mostly fishermen.

This is also the regime that ordered the bombing of a South Korean civilian airliner in 1987, killing 115 people. In 1983 its agents bombed a high-level South Korean delegation visiting Rangoon in Burma (now Yangon in Myanmar), killing 17 South Korean cabinet ministers and four Burmese. Last year's presumed attack on the South Korean naval vessel, the Cheonan, in March, killing 46 sailors and the artillery barrage on civilians living on the island of Yeonpyeong in November were only the latest in a string of lawless acts of aggression.

So it must be debatable whether there is any point in “engaging” the North Korean government. The North insists on punctilious observation by the other side of the small print of any agreement, yet will do whatever it can to flout its own obligations. Or, when these prove too onerous or too difficult to cheat its way around, it kicks over the negotiating table and storms out. The huge diplomatic effort invested in restarting the “six-party” talks on North Korea's nuclear programme, stalled for nearly 18 months now, seems futile. Watching today's campaign against Libya's Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who earned kudos and forgiveness in 2003 for forsaking nefarious nuclear ambitions, must have made Kim Jong Il and his sidekicks even more determined to cling on to—and enhance—their putative nuclear deterrent.

Yet shunning North Korea entirely, on the ground that it keeps on reselling the same horse and never delivers it ready to ride, is not really an option. No one wants to contemplate military intervention, and talks are the only alternative. Moreover, the evidence of the past is mixed. The seven years following the signature of a “framework agreement” with America in 1994 did not see an end to North Korean illicit activity. But, as Alexander Vorontsov, a Russian scholar, has argued, it was “the most successful period of strict international monitoring of North Korea's nuclear programme”.

This week Stephen Bosworth, America's point man on North Korea, was in Seoul, the latest leg in a dogged mission to revive the six-party process. The sticking-point is South Korea's understandable demand for an admission of guilt and an apology for last year's attacks. Eventually, it will have to be overcome.

Of faith and food

That demand colours the debate over whether North Korea should be granted food aid. At present, the North receives virtually no food aid apart from an unknown amount from China. But, conscious of the famine that devastated North Korea in the 1990s, when more than 1m died, the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) has sounded the alarm. It wants to help feed 6.1m vulnerable people. Donors have balked, fearing that North Korea is deliberately exaggerating the risks, or hopes to use starvation to win diplomatic concessions. If food is given, the worry is that it will go first to the army, or even be hoarded for a bumper celebration next year of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mr Kim's late father, Kim Il Sung.

Monitoring of aid distribution will always be “imperfect”, as Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, two American scholars, have noted. But even if the WFP has been misled into giving an inflated estimate of the dangers, “food aid may nonetheless be warranted.” The evidence is that some North Koreans do indeed risk starving. Their government is perfectly capable of using starvation as a bargaining chip. But neither that, nor the likelihood that some food aid would be stolen, are excuses for giving nothing. They are reasons to try to negotiate decent monitoring arrangements, in full knowledge, as Mr Haggard and Mr Noland put it with scholarly understatement, that “good faith on the part of North Korea can never be assumed.”