The news last week that as many as 2 million North Koreans may have died during three years of famine and that the North Korean government, according to U.S. intelligence sources, may be risking its aid deal by covertly building an underground nuclear complex is an infuriating turn of events. The United States has an important role to play in stopping what amounts to self-genocide by North Korea’s leaders.

The famine report comes courtesy of a congressional delegation, which estimates that the famine has killed between 300,000 and 800,000 people a year, with 2 million being the highest possible. Most of the deaths have been the result of famine-related illnesses such as pneumonia or diarrhea, rather than actual starvation. Two years of flooding followed by a drought last summer crushed the nation’s antiquated farming system.

The presense of a nuclear complex would be a serious violation of the 1994 agreement led by South Korea and the United States in which North Korea agreed to give up its goal of building nuclear weapons in exchange for $6 billion in assistance, including two nuclear power reactors. That North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Il would jeopardize future aid at this desperate moment in his country’s history suggests that he has yet to understand that many of his country’s ills rest with his Communist government.

The Asian economic crisis has made it difficult for South Korea to fully meet the terms of the 1994 agreement and North Korea reportedly has complained that the United States has yet to deliver all the assistance it has promised. Nevertheless, the congressional report and the potential of nuclear arms being produced by Pyongyang gives Congress a fresh opportunity to establish, along with the leaders of South Korea, clear goals in its policies regarding Naorth Korea.

A place to start might be to ensure food and medical supplies for the duration of the food crisis, but limit nonenergy technological assistance until modest democratic reforms take place and North Korea’s military threat is reduced or eliminated. Such a reduction could be met with similar action across the border.

South Korean President Kim Dae Jung blames the Asian economic failure in part on Asia’s decision to put economic development ahead of democracy. With a stronger democracy, he told the Washington Post last winter, “the collusive intimacy between the business and government and corruption would not have been as great here… Usually the dictatorship or authoritarian style of government lies to people.”

Lies carried North Korean leaders for decades, with a terrible cost to the people of that country. Congress now has the chance to wean North Korea away from those lies while spreading democracy.