Never-before-seen images from inside North Korea reveal haunting devastation of 90s famine

Harrowing images from inside North Korea revealed the abject poverty and widespread starvation that hit the Hermit Kingdom during the 1990s famine — including children who wasted away quietly inside their homes.The photos, captured by humanitarian Kathi Zellweger and journalist Mike Chinoy, included images of orphans so malnourished that their ribs were clearly visible and limbs were as scrawny as twigs. “I used to call it a hidden famine because it wasn’t in the streets, people were suffering at home,” Zellweger told The Post.The images stand as one of the world’s first looks into the famine that overtook North Korea following the breakup of the Soviet Union and collapse of Pyongyang’s communist Public Distribution System, which provided food rations across the nation.Without help from their own government, the people were left to fend for themselves, Zellweger and Chinoy said in their new book, “Miss Kathi: Saving Lives in North Korea.” The North Korea government has done its best to cover up the famine, claiming 225,000 people died.However, one USAID administrator estimated that the number could be as high as 3.5 million — 10 to 19% of the nation’s population at the time.

The famine hit North Korea’s most vulnerable population the hardest, with orphanages struggling to take care of the children without help from the government, which had been the sole source of food for many residents.“In orphanages or children’s homes, they would say, ‘We don’t know what to do with these hungry children.We never had to deal with hungry children,'” Zellweger recalled. “In these children’s homes, I would visit, at the same time you saw these starving children, I was always impressed how the staff there cared for them because they also had a difficult life themselves,” she said.The book contains interviews with families that Zellweger met during her work, including one family who appeared to be well-off on the surface with several luxury go...