Asia-Pacific, Development & Aid, Headlines, Human Rights

NORTH KOREA: Train Disaster Shows Marginal Change, Others Doubt it

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, May 5 2004 (IPS) - A deadly train explosion in North Korea two weeks ago has come to be regarded as a moment to gauge hints of possible change in that tightly controlled, secretive country.

An U.N. official who was among the few foreigners permitted to visit the site of the Apr. 22 railway disaster revealed signs of openness that were often regarded as impossible under the Stalinist regime of President Kim Jong-il.

These signs included the freedom to walk around the disaster site unimpeded and take photographs. In addition, Anthony Banbury, head of the Asia office of the World Food Programme (WFP), had access to the hospitals where the victims of the train blast were treated.

”We had access to walk around where we wanted to and take pictures,” Banbury told journalists this week at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand. ”The director of the hospital offered to brief us. He let us see the conditions of the patients.”

”This was a bit unusual, because we had complete access to the patients,” he added. ”The doctors said that 60 percent of the patients in one hospital were children.”

The photographs that accompanied Banbury’s account conveyed just how badly the children were hurt by North Korea’s worst train disaster. There were images of children with burnt faces, eyes bandaged and heads wrapped in gauze.

Most of them came from two schools located near the point where the train explosion took place in the town of Ryongchon, near the border with China. The two schools were damaged beyond repair, said the WFP official.

That scale of destruction was the case with other nearby buildings, too. ”The houses nearby were flattened,” Banbury said. ”At the blast site there was a large crater big enough for four city buses.”

The train disaster left over 150 people dead, including 76 children, while 1,300 people were injured, states North Korean government.

According to a U.N. statement from North Korea, the damage to property included 1,850 homes, many large buildings, schools and offices that, in all, ”represent up to 40 percent of the area of the township”.

North Korean officials said the accident took place after electric wires came into contact with explosive contents, including ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, in train carriages.

The initial reaction following the devastation was predictable. Pyongyang was tight-lipped. The local media hardly breathed a word for the first two days.

Then, the North Korean regime took the unusual step of acknowledging that an accident had taken place and appealed for international assistance. The local media, too, broke new ground by announcing the Ryongchon disaster, but with its own face-saving twist.

The state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), for instance, brought up the event by writing about the heroism of some women who sacrificed their lives when they tried to save portraits of Kim Jong-il and his late father, Kim Il-sung.

But even this would not have happened a few years ago, where the government preferred to keep news of such disasters ”more isolated,” said Banbury. ”They had no choice but to report the information because U.N. agencies were going back and forth from the site.”

Such was not the case in 2000 when information about a train accident south of Pyongyang, which resulted in several deaths and injuries, was suppressed. A similar cover-up was underway during the earlier part of a far more devastating crisis – the famine in the 1990s that, according to some estimates, killed between half a million to three million North Koreans.

According to Koreans based in Thailand, the assistance that North Korea has received since it went public with the April disaster goes against the grain of self-reliance or ‘juche’ that Pyongyang has always upheld as a state principle.

”Self-reliance has been important for national pride in North Korea,” Mira Kim, vice president of the Korean Association in Thailand, told IPS. ”It must be humiliating for the government to open its doors and accept assistance.”

Among the countries pouring in aid to the country are China, Russia and South Korea.

”It is also possible that they may have started to accept the reality that they cannot be self-reliant and isolated any more,” added Mira Kim. ”But this should not be interpreted as the beginnings of dramatic change.”

Senior South Korean journalist In-Young Kim is also not ready to declare that Pyongyang’s uncharacteristic behaviour following the train disaster is an indicator of change in one of Asia’s most oppressive countries.

”What happened after the train disaster does not amount to a shift in policy,” Kim In-Young, Asia correspondent for the Korean Broadcasting System, told IPS. ”It was very rare, because there are little signs elsewhere to suggest a shift.”

The more open attitude by the Kim regime over the disaster is a case of a government that is ”desperate for help”, he said. Nothing else.”

In North Korea, which was established as an independent communist-ruled country in 1948, human rights violations have been rampant and food shortages continue to be acute. According to WFP, the U.N. food assistance agency, malnutrition is widespread among the country’s 23 million population. ”Almost 41 percent of children under five years suffer from chronic malnutrition,” said Banbury.

The likelihood of the government easing its grip on power to help its youngest citizens appear remote, given that state priorities include building missiles, keeping its army strong, pursuing its nuclear programme and propagating public devotion towards the country’s reclusive leader, Kim.

This week, the North Korean leader made his first public appearance after the train blast, revealed the state news agency KCNA. But there was little to suggest that a whiff of change was in the air: there was no mention of what the Dear Leader, as he is known, had to say about the disaster.