Posted on 05/29/2004 7:15:24 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Sights of Silence
By RICHARD RAGAN as told to JAMES BROOKE
Published: May 23, 2004
North Korea is a whisker smaller than my home state, Mississippi. But when I heard about the explosion last month at Ryongchon train station, I knew I was in for a long, hard drive. As the crow flies, it was 300 miles. But I was in the northeast corner of the country, near the Russian border, when I heard the news on the BBC. With North Korea's bumpy dirt roads and circuitous routes, our convoy of white Toyota Land Cruisers faced a three-day, 800-mile road trip. In March, I moved from Zambia to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and took over the United Nations World Food Program mission, the largest foreign aid program in North Korea. Because I knew our office and staff 10 miles from the blast site at Ryongchon would be overwhelmed, I had to go.
Usually it takes four to five days to get travel itineraries approved in North Korea, but the government official who was traveling with us was visibly shocked when he heard of the explosion. So, three days after the blast, which officials said was caused by workers who mishandled electric power connectors near a train, I led a United Nations team into Ryongchon with Tony Banbury, an old friend who now directs W.F.P.'s Asia operations.
As we pulled into the city, I couldn't see that anything was wrong. But then we moved closer and saw glass scattered everywhere like pebbles. All the windows had been blown out, and there was debris on the roofs. Then I realized everything was flattened. This reminded me of the pictures I'd seen of World War II bombing campaigns in Dresden. Starting 900 yards from the blast center, all you could see was rubble. At the explosion point, there was a hole that looked big enough to fit four city buses. All around the hole, the ground was littered with little pieces of heavy-gauge steel from the rails or boxcars. I am sure that when the train blew, that stuff shot out like bullets. With each step, I was kicking shrapnel.
The area was very calm and quiet. I have been to Kosovo, East Timor, even to a volcanic eruption in Montserrat. By comparison, people here suffer in silence. Three days after a disaster, normally you hear a lot of shouting, hammering and heavy equipment. There were two backhoes and bulldozers, but men were only tinkering with them, either maintaining them or trying to get them started. People were quietly digging through the rubble with their hands, trying to find anything they could salvage from their houses, which had stood nearby. It looked like another black-and-white image from World War II: families trudging away in the cold and gray, with their possessions on ox carts. We asked the city manager what they needed. He said food, building materials, blankets, tents, cooking utensils. We had brought a truckload of food and promised more.
There had been a primary school near the station. School let out at noon, and the blast took place at 12:08. I walked into one room and saw two bloody hand prints on one wall. My wife, Marcela, and I had our first child 18 months ago. I just stood there thinking, this must be a parent's worst nightmare: send the kid to school and then find out it has blown up. The area was littered with book bags, papers, children's shoes. When we were at the school, men were cleaning up, throwing desks, chairs and rubbish out the top windows. I guess they had given up searching for survivors. But the day after we were there, they pulled a boy, still alive, out of the rubble I had been standing on.
We drove to Sinuija next to visit the People's Provincial Hospital. In our group there were two Americans, a Norwegian, an Irishman and some North Koreans. We were the first foreigners to visit the injured victims. The director said there were 365 patients, and about 60 percent were children. He particularly wanted to show me the most critical patients, in an appeal for help. He saw in me an opportunity to get the support he needed.
Some kids were sleeping two to a bed. The legs of a few beds were propped up with rocks to make them flat. There were maybe two or three IV drips in the place. We did not see one mechanical device working. The only person on oxygen had two tubes pushed into his nose, no oxygen mask.
A year ago, I broke my collarbone. Hospitals were loud in Zambia. But in this one, I was struck again by the almost ghostlike quiet. Some parents were lying on beds, stroking their children's hair, quietly talking to them. In the parents' faces, you could see what pain they were going through. There was one boy who looked blinded; his face was stitched together with twine. He was standing, and his mother had her arm around him, doing her best to offer comfort.
We didn't show up at the hospital to just look around. We delivered oil, biscuits and wheat. But we are pulling resources from a program that is way underfinanced. Across the country, we are supposed to be feeding 6.5 million people a month. In April, we fed 3.2 million. In May, we will be feeding only 2.6 million. And after September, we will be at zero. Maybe this tragedy will jolt the world awake.
Ping!
Sorry, it didn't.
The US media was too busy trying to bring down the government via the Iraqi "prison abuse" scandal.
Uhhh... So if the US, thru the UN, takes responsibility for famine relief, North Norea won't have to divert any funds from their gigantic and important weapons programs to actually feed their own people?
I couldn't help but be moved by this piece. (It reminded me of something written by a former journalist who was in South Korea during the Korean War.)
As always, it's the average person who suffers... while the fools at the top go on being foolish.
Ping!
Did we all buy into the idea that this was a coalition operation? Could it be a warning: this can happen to your trains, too?
That is right. Somehow, taking care of ordinary N. Korean people has become responsibility of outsiders, while N. Korean regime has developed new mobile medium range missiles with the range of 3,000-4,000 km.
The problem is that "we" care more about the plight of North Koreans than do their rulers. North Korea's hunger and poverty situation would be solved in an instant if their rulers would only say: "We were wrong, socialism doesn't work, its a bust...sorry! We'll let the ROK take over for now". But no, these fiends have to cling to power, and we enable them by feeding their populace so the fiends can have more missles and tanks in their parade.
Maybe this tragedy will jolt Kim IL awake.
5.56mm
accident right...ha!
All I can really think of when I think and read of the issues in North Korea, and Kim Il Jong... is the silent suffering of the people of that country...to be so tied down under that cult of personality, and to have the well being of the country subjugated to that madman it harkens back to that days of Stalin... Of course like father like son. I just pray that some day that North Korea sees the light of a new day and this will all end.
Yeah, that is certainly a possibility, though we may not be able to confirm or disprove it for some time.:)
N. Korea is one giant penal colony, where the Borg's slogan, "Resistance is futile!", is rammed into people's mind at all times.
You don't believe the explosion of those warehoused missiles being sold to Syria was an accident?
yeah, typical of a communist state.... I would hate to be the commies when a majority of that population finds out that it has been intentionally starved by their 'dear leader'
I think Kim's days are numbered, but that country will be in turmoil after he dies because there does not appear to be a person to fill that void...
North Korea wouldn't divert it's money from the weapons program anyway, they would just let their people starve. Any aid attempts in North Korea is like trying to empty an ocean with a teaspoon. The problem is political, look at the prosperity of South Korea and ask yourself why, just over an imaginary line, there is such hunger and poverty.
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