By Patrick J. Killen, Weekender Contributing Editor With reports in early August telling of new flood damage and a growing food shortage in North Korea, expat journalist Bernie Krisher pushed ahead with his one-man campaign to help the country that almost no one likes. Tetsunao Yamamori, president of the Food for the Hungry International, said after a visit in late July to the reclusive communist state the food ration in many parts of North Koreas was down to 200 grams, a situation he termed "famine stage level." International aid efforts have been slow in taking hold. The United States, which can't seem to decide between a carrot-or-a-stick policy, is sending North Korea more than 13,000 tons of grains and rice, aboard the U.S. Navy's USS Tampa Bay, scheduled to arrive on Aug. 22. Krisher began mounting his private food aid program nearly a year ago, helped by the Internet. He has already made two personal aid deliveries to North Korea and plans another more ambition one in September, despite having to overcome several large obstacles. Such as: --International politics and the U.S. Treasury Department, which blocked his U.S. bank account set up to collect aid funds. --North Korea's "death-wish" foreign policy that seems earnestly engaged in fostering bad relations with most of the world. --His own delicate heart operation in June. Krisher's latest strategy, brain-stormed during his convalescence in a rehabilitation center, is to encourage South Koreans to embark on "a civil disobedience campaign" by ignoring Seoul's legal restrictions and openly contributing to North Korean food aid. Last year, floods devastated North Korea's fall harvest, leaving a half million people homeless and affecting more than 5 million. The UN's World Food Program and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies agree that the hermit nation, a Cold War communist remnant of 23 million people, is still facing a serious food shortage. New floods in July made matters worse, and even prompted the usually uninformative Korean Central News Agency to report that "unprecedented heavy rains seriously damaged vast areas of the country" and "caused heavy losses of human lives." Bernard Krisher is a hard-driving, Hitler-refugee American, a former Newsweek magazine bureau chief in Tokyo, who has lived in Japan since 1962. He was a Newsweek correspondent for 18 years, helped in creating Japan's popular FOCUS magazine and still has a hand in several publications. In recent years, he has turned his attention and considerable energy to humanitarian efforts, notably in Cambodia, where he is currently working to set up a hospital. He is also publisher of the Cambodia Daily, an English-language newspaper that he sees as a unifying factor. After reading about the North Korean floods in August 1995, Krisher said, "It just sort of hit me. Here was a country that was isolated, that nobody likes, and they are suddenly hit by a catastrophe, which if it happened elsewhere, say Japan or Ethiopia, people would be flocking to help them, but because it is North Korea, nobody wants to." The communist North has long been a thorn in the side of East Asia. Although it is regarded as an economic basket case, it maintains a million-man military and remains a threat to South Korea, which it invaded in 1950, and a foreign policy nightmare for the United States and Japan. Krisher says that "out of the blue" last September "I sent a fax to the North Korean government to their International Post Office fax number, saying I was an individual and I see that not many countries are helping you, (The United States had come up with a token $25,000 at that time) and I would like to open up a home page on the Internet and try to get private international support. How do you feel about that?" Two days later, the North Koreans responded by thanking him and expressing gratitude for "opening up a home page on the Internet." Krisher said he later found out they didn't know what the Internet wasata and said, 'Mr. Krisher has a good record, he has done humanitarian work for Cambodia, and we think you can trust that this is all clothing for humanitarian purposes.' They called me back to say the boxes were on the ship. "I think the Japanese can be pretty tough when it comes to business or trade, but when it comes to something like this, they find a way not to make it difficult," he said. Krisher and his son Joseph flew to Beijing to obtain North Korean visas and then on to Pyongyang, where they traveled to Wonsan to meet the ship. After the goods were sorted, Krisher said, "We went to three different flood affected areas in November and distributed the clothing and powdered milk directly to the people." Krisher is a stickler for direct distribution to assure those who have contributed that their aid goes to the right people. Son Joseph filmed their trip "and we came back and proved basically that we did all this direct distribution and nothing was diverted to the wrong people." A North Korean official told Bernie, "We don't need any more clothing or blankets. We are going to face a famine, please try to collect rice and bring us rice next time." Krisher then used the home page to campaign for cash, collecting $65,000 which he used to order 160 tons of rice, enough, he said, to feed 19,500 people for one month. The rice was an exceptional bargain at $250 a ton. Japan had previously imported the rice from Thailand, and apparently was anxious to get rid of it after it bombed at the marketplace. Bernie and Joseph returned to North Korea in March and took possession of their rice at the dock in Nampo. There they were able to organize an impressive 20-truck convoy in a land where there is little traffic outside the capital of Pyongyang. "I paid for the gas, they provided the trucks and the drivers. We videoed all of this, the dramatic convoy going up the highway, into the flood-stricken areas and delivering the rice to the empty warehouses. The next day, we also directed the distribution to the people and even poured rice into their sacks." Color pictures of the truck convoy and the rice unloading and distribution are on Krisher's Internet home page. (http://shrine.cyber.ad.jp/mrosin/flood). One American journalist has suggested that the people who took the rice were all actors, and the rice diverted for the North Korean military. "Knowing their infrastructure, their budget and so on, where would they get these actors?" Bernie responded. "Would they ship them in from Pyongyang to get there (90 kilometers to the north) an hour before me when they haven't got enough money to ship rice? I don't think so. With so many people watching, there's no way that the rice could have been diverted." He and Joseph visited a hospital at Huichon, and Krisher later sent the hospital $10,000 in aid funds to repair boilers damaged in the floods. A message from North Korea said the repairs had cost $9,500 and the remaining $500 was used for food for children suffering from malnutrition. Krisher is now seeking $100,000 for another shipment of rice he plans to personally deliver in September. Besides the Internet appeal, he has appeared before various groups in Japan and South Korea and shown films and pictures of the earlier North Korean deliveries. In mid-campaign, Krisher found he was often short of breath. This spring he was examined in Boston's Beth Israel Hospital. On June 5, doctors "split me open like a lobster," he said, and installed a new aortic valve in his heart. During his convalescence in Cambridge, Mass., he kept active with a laptop computer and telephone in his room and a facsimile machine in the hall. He also started thinking about how best to involve South Koreans in the plight of North Korea, even though they are prohibited by law. On the home page, Krisher invokes Henry David Thoreau, St. Thomas Aquinas, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and portions of the Encyclopedia Britannica in an effort to show South Koreans "there is a higher law," and if they have to go to jail, it is for the right cause. "These people (Thoreau, Aquinas, Gandhi, King) never said they were against the system but there can be laws in the system that are unjust," Krisher said. He will push his campaign in Seoul later this month as the keynote speaker at a gathering of Korean writers. While recuperating, Krisher also learned that his U.S. account, set up at the Crestar Bank in Washington, D.C., to collect Korean aid funds, had been quietly unblocked by the U.S. Treasury Department. The account was called the Internet Appeal for North Korean Flood Victims and U.S. officials froze it several months earlier. "I protested this on the Internet and in an open letter to President Clinton, which was never answered," Bernie recalled. "I did talks to the Treasury Department once, and they asked me a lot of questions, and I thought I had better get a lawyer. (It seemed like) they were going to put me in jail over the telephone for dealing with the enemy." But that has now been cleared up, the account closed and the money returned. The Treasury Department said such funds for North Korea must be sent through the UN's World Food Program. "I think the U.S. position has changed," Krisher said. "The U.S. attitude is that Washington is not discouraging individuals, and the government is making a major donation. (U.S. Embassy press attachˇ Emi Lynn Yamauchi in Tokyo confirms the United States has made a $6.2 million contribution under the government's Food for Peace Program and reported that the 13,000 ton grain shipment aboard the USS Tampa Bay is en route to a North Korean port.) Krisher notes that the U.S. gesture marks a shift away from a lock-step policy with close ally South Korea, which has opposed more food aid until the North Koreans agree to come to a four-nation peace conference. "You are our friends, (the U.S. is saying), but we part company when it comes to helping. The U.S. is not sending massive amounts of rice, but I think if there were to be a real famine, probably the United States would move very quickly," Bernie said. "I am quite proud to be an American. We may be slow, but we aren't cruel. We usually do the right thing in the end." Krisher's interest in North Korea is an accident of history, or perhaps more accurately, an accident of journalism. It has its origins in1964 when he spent a month in Cambodia and reported in Newsweek that students were saying Prince Sihanouk's mother was "money mad" and "she was profiting from all the bordellos on her properties" in Phnom Penh. Sihanouk, the head of state, was incensed and shortly after he read the story he broke relations with the United States. In 1970, Sihanouk was deposed and expelled from Cambodia. Later, he and Krisher met in New York and became good friends. Since then, Krisher has helped Sihanouk with a book of his memoirs and supported his return to Cambodia. Because Sihanouk's previous government had recognized North Korea when few others did, Korean leader-for-life Kim Il-Sung built Sihanouk an exile home in Pyongyang. In 1979 Krisher visited Sihanouk in North Korea at a time when Western journalists were not allowed. He also made reporting visits there in 1990 and 1991. He said he finds the North Koreans quite a bit like those in South Korea, but "actually a rather quiet people." He said, "On a personal basis (and away from the capital), they are not into propaganda. When you go there for the fourth or fifth time, the conversation is mostly about family. The people ask a lot of questions, how did I bring up my children, how did I get them to be obedient. It's like 40 years ago. They haven't moved into the modern world." What does Krisher get out of helping North Korea? "The satisfaction in proving that nothing is impossible," he said. "Meeting the challenge. Helping people who are helpless and giving something back to society." Here are the banks that are accepting donations for Krisher's North Korean relief activities: In Japan: Account name: North Korea Flood Relief Account number: 748849 (Futsu Yokin) Hiroo Garden Hills Branch Bank: Sumitomo Bank In South Korea: Account name: Hope Worldwide, Korea Account number: 371-05-012315 Branch: Kangnam Choongang Bank: Shinhan Bank In Australia: Account name: North Korean Flood Relief Account number: 06-2903-1011-9582 Bank: Commonwealth Bank of Australia Account address: ANU branch, ACT 0200, Canberra -- new Yen and dollar checks may be sent to Bernard Krisher, at 4-1-7-605, Hiroo, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150.