To hear North Korea's state media tell it, in the midst of an inferno of exploding rail cars and dying children, several heroic women made the ultimate sacrifice, running into blazing buildings in frantic attempts to save treasured portraits of Kim Jong-il and his late father, Kim Il-sung.
"Many people of the county evacuated portraits before searching after their family members or saving their household goods," the Korean Central News Agency wrote approvingly from Ryongchon, the railroad town where a huge explosion killed at least 161 people and wounded 1,300 last week.
"They were buried under the collapsing building to die a heroic death as they were trying to come out with portraits of President Kim Il-sung and leader Kim Jong-il," it said.
In North Korea, where the state personality cult is stronger than in Mao Zedong's (
A staple of North Korea's propaganda mythology, tales of people sacrificing themselves for portraits of Kim Jong-il, known as the Dear Leader, are being reissued at a time when speculation unleashed by the explosion is swirling.
For starters, where is the Dear Leader?
One week after the blast, the state media has not chronicled any new doings by North Korea's secretive leader. Admittedly, Kim lives a Wizard of Oz existence. In his 30 years of political life and 10 years as supreme leader, he is not known to have given a public speech. To prevent assassination attempts, the North Korean media never give clues as to where he is or will be.
On April 21, Chinese state television reported that he had just left Beijing for home; everyone knows it is a 12-hour train ride to Pyongyang.
South Korean reports said his train passed through Ryongchon before dawn on Thursday, about eight hours before the blast.
In the days after the blast, reporters in Dandong, on the Chinese border, said Kim's entourage had been joined by a decoy train when he crossed the border into North Korea, a standard safety precaution.
Another nagging question: what caused the blast? Without citing a source or witness, KCNA, the North Korean news agency, said the "explosion was caused by the contact of electric lines during the shunt of wagons loaded with nitric ammonium fertilizer and tank wagons." This explosion, KCNA said, was "equivalent to the blast of about 100 bombs each weighing one tonne."
How that information could be known remains unclear. Photographs and accounts of foreign aid workers allowed to tour the scene give a picture of total devastation, deep craters surrounded by hundreds of yards of debris and desolation. It is unlikely that any witness to the ignition could have survived the blast.
Children accounted for almost half the death toll. About 500 of the 1,300 people wounded were blinded; scores of them were children, according to foreign aid workers who toured hospital wards in Sinuiju, the regional center. Some analysts have speculated that the children might have been lined up to wave at the train of a passing dignitary.
"So let's ask why half the casualties were kids and why so many of them have facial/eye injuries," Robyn Lim, a conservative military analyst in Japan, wrote.
MINERAL DEPOSITS: The Pacific nation is looking for new foreign partners after its agreement with Canada’s Metals Co was terminated ‘mutually’ at the end of last year Pacific nation Kiribati says it is exploring a deep-sea mining partnership with China, dangling access to a vast patch of Pacific Ocean harboring coveted metals and minerals. Beijing has been ramping up efforts to court Pacific nations sitting on lucrative seafloor deposits of cobalt, nickel and copper — recently inking a cooperation deal with Cook Islands. Kiribati opened discussions with Chinese Ambassador Zhou Limin (周立民) after a longstanding agreement with leading deep-sea mining outfit The Metals Co fell through. “The talk provides an exciting opportunity to explore potential collaboration for the sustainable exploration of the deep-ocean resources in Kiribati,” the government said
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
The central Dutch city of Utrecht has installed a “fish doorbell” on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht’s Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a Web site. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through. Now in its fifth year, the
RSS