빈곤과 기아의 상품화 : 대북인도지원단체들의 모금마케팅 전략

Abstract

격세지감(隔世之感)이라는 말처럼 최근의 남-북한 관계를 적확하게 표현하는 말도 없을 듯하다.지난 50년 동안 서로를 주적(主敵)으로 규정하고 체제정당성 경쟁에 열을 올려온 남과 북이 보안법과 노동당법 개정을 공개적으로 토론할 정도로 한반도는 역사의 급류를 타고 있다.김대중 정부의 햇볕정책은 2000년 6월 15일 평양에서 개최된 남-북 정상회담이라는 역사적 사건을 일구어냈다.그 이 후로 지속적으로 추진된 정부, 기업 그리고 민간차원에서의 교류는 그 전개속도나 범위가 놀라울 정도다.무엇보다도 놀라운 현상중의 하나는 1997년 남한정부의 민간의 대북지원 허용조치와 더불어 한국사회에서 활발하게 일어나고 있는 민간차원에서의 대북인도지원 현상이다. Since the massive 1995 famine in the North, the concerns for the welfare of North Koreans have been on the rise among the South Korea's public.With the changes of Seoul government's policy towards humanitarian assistance to the North, NGOs in the South have been engaging in aggressive fund raising campaigns.The amount of humanitarian assistance to the North has increased more than twenty four times as of 2000 since 1997 when the law permitted non-political assistance to the North.The violation of North Korean children's human rights, however, has been one of the concerns for their marketing strategies The NGOs have been using the bleak images of the innocent victims facing hunger, disease and death in their campaign ads inducing sympathetic from the potential donors.This paper attempts to trace the causes of such unethical fund raising practices of the South Korean NGOs furthering victimization of the innocent victims.This paper argues that the following structural variables contibute to such violation of North Korean beneficiary's human rights: the increasing competition among the humanitarian NGOs, the serious gap in the availability of governmental aids making the rich NGOs richer and the poor organizations poorer, the lack of assistance areas of expertise, the political dependability of assistance activities, and the effectiveness of "begging" strategies by inducing sympathies from the South Korean donors for the North Korean children.The NGOs' unethical campaign strategies have serous ramifications for the peninsula's future reconciliation and peace-building.The future generation of north Korea will have to bear the burden of having been the beneficiaries of South Koreans' relief activities.South Koreans, on the other hand, will continue to remember their North Korean counterparts as the helpless victims as portrayed in those campaign ads.Such imbalance in the positionality between the North and South Koreans will impede the peaceful and just social integration on the peninsula in the future .