Train Victims’ Suffering Is Compounded

Shocking photographs and descriptions of children with rags wrapped around their wounds for lack of bandages, writhing in agony for lack of painkillers, have exposed the miserable state of North Korean hospitals trying to deal with last week’s train explosion.

The disaster in the town of Ryongchon killed 161 people and injured about 1,300 others, about half of them children who had just left a nearby elementary school for lunch when the explosion occurred. Many were blinded after they curiously turned to glimpse the unfolding disaster and took the full force of the blast in their eyes.

When they were eventually brought to hospitals, there were no medicines, no intravenous fluids, no antibiotics, no beds.

Aid workers who visited one of the hospitals in nearby Sinuiju over the weekend reported seeing the children’s cuts stitched with rudimentary twine, their blackened faces still dirty with gravel and broken glass. The hospital lacked sanitary facilities to prevent infections in burn victims.

“There were wounded children lying on top of supply cabinets, suggesting they had a shortage of beds,” World Food Program regional director Tony Banbury told reporters Tuesday in Beijing.

“People had a lot of facial injuries. The skin was charred and ripped off.... There were only very basic wound dressings. Many patients would have appeared to have benefited from ointments and bandages, but they seemed to need additional supplies,” Banbury said.

A Chinese source who visited the scene told the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo, “I went to one Chinese medicine practitioner’s, and there were several wounded being treated there. The skin on most of the patients’ faces was almost peeled off, and in particular, children were crying with their eyes bandaged.”

Although North Korean hospitals were long known to be primitive, the graphic descriptions provided by the aid workers have touched a nerve. Photos taken of the hospitals and the devastated neighborhood of the explosion have inspired an outpouring of offers of medicine, food and daily necessities.

In South Korea, where the images are evocative of the damage left by the 1950-53 Korean War, telethons and fund-raising drives in the streets are expected to raise more than $10 million.

Diplomats and aid workers have complimented the North Korean government for providing unusual access to the scene of the disaster.

“They’ve been very gracious. They’ve provided us with every access we need,” Richard Ragan, the World Food Program’s country director in North Korea, said Tuesday in Beijing.

But the North Korean government is also getting some criticism for restricting the flow of aid to victims.

North Korea rejected an offer by hospitals in the Chinese border city of Dandong -- a stone’s throw from Sinuiju across the Yalu River -- to treat patients there. It also turned down South Korea’s offer to send a fully staffed and equipped floating hospital onto the Yalu or to send emergency medical aid across the demilitarized zone, declaring that everything would have to go via a slow ship route.

At a meeting Tuesday in the North Korean city of Kaesong, near the demilitarized zone, the North said it didn’t want medical aid and would prefer cement, bulldozers, diesel fuel, construction tools and televisions -- items that critics suspect might be diverted to uses other than the rebuilding of Ryongchon.

“North Korea proved again it does not care about human lives. Burned children are kept as hostages to ask for foreign money,” Norbert Vollertsen, a German physician and human rights advocate for North Koreans, said in a statement today.

In a rather unusual move for a regime that never publicly acknowledges bad news, North Korea’s official news service over the weekend announced the disaster and gave the death toll. But the coverage was overshadowed by gala celebrations in honor of the 72nd anniversary of the North Korean army.

Scott Snyder, an Asia Foundation expert on North Korea and coauthor of a recent book on aid agencies’ experiences in the country, said North Korea probably wouldn’t have acknowledged the accident had it not taken place so close to the Chinese border -- which is 12 miles from Ryongchon -- where news could seep out.

“Thus far, I don’t see any real change in the North Korean modus operandi,” Snyder said. “We’ve seen a perfect illustration of the frustrations of the international aid community in dealing with North Korea.”

In 1998, several medical relief agencies, most notably Doctors Without Borders, pulled out of North Korea, frustrated by the limited access the government allowed. That has contributed to the poor state of the hospitals in the country, aid officials say.

Outside Pyongyang, Sorensen said, most hospitals lack running water or have electricity only two or three hours a day, barely enough time even to sterilize medical equipment.

“They use old beer bottles for intravenous fluids. The X-ray equipment is 30 to 40 years old,” Sorensen said. “You have to admire the North Korean doctors. They do their best with what they have, but they don’t have very much.”

Kim Jin, a North Korean physician who worked in pediatrics in the city of Chongjin before she defected to South Korea, said she routinely saw children dying of easily treatable ailments.

“I knew what to do to treat the patients, but there was nothing available. There was no medicine, no blood for transfusions. I saw children dying all the time when they shouldn’t have. It broke my heart,” Kim said.

Demick reported from Seoul and Magnier from Beijing.