Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Milwaukiedave]

Apparently the flooding is much worse then the North Korean government wants us to believe. To top that off, they aren't accepting any foreign aid.

Catastrophic floods reported in North Korea
By Choe Sang-Hun International Herald Tribune

Published: August 2, 2006


SEOUL: North Korea may have suffered catastrophic damage, including an estimated 10,000 people dead or missing, from floods last month, a South Korean relief group said Wednesday. Pyongyang has rejected offers of help from outside aid agencies, aid officials said.

North Korea's government, which has been hampered by damage to the country's road and railway networks and by dwindling financial resources, is poorly equipped to deal with the crisis, which has left an estimated 1.3 million to 1.5 million homeless, according to Good Friends, a Buddhist relief group based in Seoul.

"The situation they have now is worse than that of the mid- and late- 1990s," when a prolonged famine caused by years of floods and droughts killed an estimated one million people before the communist regime abandoned isolation and asked for international help, the group said in a report.

Good Friends publishes regular reports on North Korea, based on extensive interviews with people inside the North or North Koreans traveling to China.

Officials with the South Korean government, the Red Cross and the United Nations World Food Program declined to comment on the estimates from Good Friends.

Most reports about North Korea, the world's most closed country, cannot be independently confirmed.

Compounding the problems that North Korea is facing is a refusal to accept outside aid.

"WFP is prepared to help North Korea," said Barry Came, a spokesman for the World Food Program said by telephone from Bangkok. "But we were informed by the North Korean government that they can deal with the problem on their own."

The South Korean Red Cross also has offered help but received the same reply, said Kim Hyung Sup, a spokesman.

Now North Korea is facing a dilemma, experts said.

"This may be almost a national crisis situation for the regime, but it may find it difficult to acknowledge the true scale of damage to its people," Chung Se Hyun, a former unification minister of South Korea, told reporters. "The regime may desperately want outside aid, but it cannot ask for it in public because it may cause instability."

Chung called on private agencies to ship aid. Officials at Good Friends raised fears of a food crisis and epidemics. In the southern North Korean town of Haeju alone, 200 bodies were recovered, they said.

Chronic fuel shortages have driven North Koreans to denude hills for firewood, leaving the country extremely vulnerable to floods.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/02/news/flood.php

(edit: Fixed double post of article)

[Junior]

No trees on the hillsides, thats a lot of loose soil that gets washed away whenever theres a few days of changma....

the south did well with its extensive reforrestation programme.
Environmentally speaking they've now messed up though with extensive coastal reclamation of mudflats. Byebye Korean seafood/fishing industry.