International efforts grow to help North Korea explosion victims

By Hans Greimel
The Associated Press

AP / KOREA NEWS SERVICE Makeshift tents are set up on the ground in Ryongchon, North Korea, this week in the wake of a huge train explosion last Thursday. International aid is arriving.

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South Korea announced today that it plans to ship $20 million in relief goods. The North earlier rejected Seoul's offer to send doctors, saying it already had enough medical help.

South Korea said it would accept the North's requests for 50,000 tons of cement, 10,000 tons of food, 10 bulldozers, 10 steam shovels, 500 tons of diesel oil, 500 tons of gasoline, 1,500 sets of school desks and chairs, 50 blackboards and 50 television sets.

North Korea, meanwhile, lauded the "heroic deaths" of four people killed after running into collapsing or burning buildings after the explosion to retrieve portraits of leader Kim Jong Il and his late father, national founder Kim Il Sung.

"The Korean people's spirit of guarding the leader with their very lives was fully displayed," the North's official KCNA news agency said, adding that teacher Han Jong Suk, 56, "breathed her last with portraits in her bosom."

The leaders are objects of a pervasive personality cult in the communist North, with father-and-son portraits hanging in every home and building.

North Korea likened last Thursday's train blast in Ryongchon, a town of 130,000 near the Chinese border, to "100 bombs, each weighing one ton" going off at the same time.

The death toll stood at 161, with 370 victims still hospitalized. About 250 of the hospitalized victims were children.

KCNA also said the explosion left many victims "deaf and blind" and destroyed at least 8,100 homes and more than 30 public buildings.

Many suffered severe burns and eye injuries from the blast's shock wave of glass, rubble and heat, and about 20,000 rescuers were on the scene, it said.

North Korea estimated the damage in Ryongchon at $356 million, and KCNA warned Tuesday that "the damage is unexpectedly gaining in scope."
 
International aid agencies have put no price tag on reconstruction. The North's damage estimate far outweighs what donors have promised, fueling speculation that Pyongyang is trying to gain as much aid as possible.

The North's rejection of Seoul's offer to truck supplies overland, across the heavily fortified no man's land separating the rivals, riled some south of the border. The refusal meant supplies that could have been sent in the same day would now arrive by ship late today at the earliest, a week after the disaster.

Pyongyang's insistence that it already had enough doctors also generated an incredulous response.

"Given the reality in the North, who would believe that?" the JoongAng Ilbo daily said yesterday in an editorial. "North Korea needs to learn how to accept a genuine offer of help for what it is."

Hospitals lack basic supplies, like intravenous drips needed to treat burn patients. The World Health Organization listed antibiotics, eye drops and burn kits as the greatest needs.

Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who worked in the North before communist authorities expelled him in late 2000, said doctors there use ordinary razor blades for surgery and empty beer bottles for intravenous drips.

"North Korea blocks trucks with South Korean aid at the inner Korean border while desperate children die," he said.

Thousands of people were living in tents without adequate sanitation or water, and relief workers described people struggling to rebuild with their bare hands.

The United States, China, Australia, Japan and Singapore are among nations that have offered aid, and Germany said it would donate $119,000 to buy food and building materials. KCNA said yesterday that a first installment of Russian relief aid valued at roughly $472,000 arrived — including medicine, tents and blankets.

In Washington, State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said the $100,000 in assistance for North Korea will benefit about 10,000 people. He added that Pyongyang has not responded to a U.S. offer to provide medical supplies and specialists.