I don't think news of the North Korean train disaster has been posted here. It's the worst in the history of train travel. And the North Korean government has blacked out all news.
Few New Details Reported in North Korean Rail Blast
By JAMES BROOKE
Published: April 23, 2004
EOUL, South Korea, Friday, April 23 — Hundreds of people were killed and injured when two trains load with fuel collided and exploded in a North Korean railroad station Thursday, only hours after North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Il had passed through, according to South Korean media reports.
YTN television estimated that up to 3,000 people were killed or wounded in massive explosions that followed the collision of one train carrying gasoline and another carrying liquefied petroleum gas.
"The station was destroyed as if hit by a bombardment and debris flew high into the sky," Yonhap said, quoting unidentified Chinese sources.
Nearly a day after the explosion, North Korea had only declared a state of alert in the area of the explosion, without providing details to the public. Some international telephone links were cut, either by the government or by the blast.
"We've obtained the information that there was a large explosion near Ryongchon Station," a South Korea defense ministry official told Yonhap news agency, asking to remain anonymous. South Korean government officials take pains to avoid offending their militarily powerful neighbor.
Although South Korean officials said today they are preparing to extend aid, it is unclear whether North Korea will ask for assistance. In the mid-1990s, a combination of official inertia and national pride led to delays in asking for foreign food aid and the deaths by starvation of around 1 million people.
Today, with North Korea’s threadbare medical system unable to cope with the massive numbers of casualties, many injured were treated by hospitals in Dangdong, China, about 10 miles north of the rail explosion site.
Survivors reports, as relayed by the South Korean media, indicate that the explosion, around noon on Thursday, could rank as the worst train disaster in world history. Until now, the world’s worst rail disaster took place in India on June 6, 1981 when at least 800 people were killed after a cyclone blew most of an overcrowded passenger train into a river.
Train wrecks with large numbers of fatalities are rare in North Korea, largely because trains creak slowly along rails that were first laid during the Japanese occupation, over 60 years ago. Foreign visitors have reported frequent stoppages due to lack of electricity and overall speeds that could be beaten by a good horse.
The massive explosion took place at on North Korea’s busiest rail line, its route from China to Pyongyang, the nation’s showcase capital. A lifeline for the impoverished nation, this route brings in food and fuel from China, the North’s largest trading partner and a major source of aid.
The fuel trains may have been payment to Mr. Kim for traveling to Beijing last week to meet with Chinese officials. In recent years, South Korea and China have routinely made large gifts to North Korea either fuel, fertilizer, food or cash to ensure that bilateral meetings take place.
“The real question may be how bad the damage is and how long will it block key imports to Pyongyang, since rail is the critical lifeline for guaranteeing access to key imports from the PRC to the Pyongyang capital area,” Scott Snyder, Korea representative for the Asia Foundation, said Friday morning.
The 1 p.m. explosion took place around the time when North Korea’s state-controlled media first informed citizens that Kim Jong Il, the nation’s leader, had made a rare trip abroad to China. Mr. Kim, who only leaves the country in a specially armored rail car, a gift to his father by Stalin, had secretly passed through Ryongchon station shortly before dawn, about nine hours before the blast.
It was Mr. Kim’s first trip to China in three years. The blast undoubtedly will shake the leadership of North Korea, a suspicious elite who maintain a personality cult around Mr. Kim, whose decade in power has coincided with the nation’s impoverishment.
Although there is no publicly available information that the explosion was anything but an accident, it is bound to feed official paranoia in a largely closed society that maintains constant vigilance and ruthless punishment for “traitors.”
“The coincidence of timing between his return to Pyongyang through the station where the accident occurred and the accident itself may raise questions in his own mind,” Mr. Snyder said, addressing widespread speculation here that the explosion was an assassination attempt on North Korea’s leader. “In an environment like North Korea's, with outdated equipment and low safety standards, accidents such as this are waiting to happen.”
In the nearly six decades of Kim family rule, there never have never been competitive elections for political office. Half a century after the end of the Korean War, North Koreans survive on a per capita income that is about seven percent of the roughly $10,000 a year level enjoyed in South Korea, a capitalist nation. To avoid protests and retain power, the communist government of the North relies on constant political indoctrination, total news control, and one of the harshest prison camp systems in the world.
Despite this, defectors say that there were assassination attempts against Mr. Kim by military officers in the late 1990s, a time when he was consolidating power inherited after the death in 1994 of his father, Kim Il Sung. Officially called “Dear Leader,” Mr. Kim lives within an elaborate security cocoon where bodyguards have orders to kill people who venture unauthorized into established security zones.
North Korean media never report his current location and only report his travels after they take place. Reviled as a leader of “the axis of Evil” by President Bush, Mr. Kim disappeared from all public view for two months last spring, a period that coincided with the American attack on the Saddam Hussein regime. Later, he did not go on what had become an annual summer train trip to the Russian Far East.
Mr. Kim does not travel by airplane. North Korea's official announcement Thursday of his three-day trip to Beijing seemed to signal that he had returned safely to Pyongyang. |
