The North Korean train blast

Even as the cause of the tragedy remains unclear, the rest of the world rushes aid to the affected country despite political differences.

in Singapore

INITIALLY there was colourful imagination running riot, mainly in Western and pro-Western circles, about a possible cover-up of the rail disaster that occurred in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) on April 22. The "secretive" ways of the regime in Pyongyang were blamed for the lack of information, even as the combined toll of fatalities and other casualties was first estimated at about 3,000, only to be scaled down, within hours, to between 50 and 150 dead and nearly 1,250 injured.

The DPRK authorities were said to have snapped international telephone lines in the wake of the disaster so as to prevent the flow of relevant news outside the rusty Iron Curtain. However, Pyongyang remained accessible by telephone throughout the crisis. As a result, when contacted from Singapore, diplomatic sources in Pyongyang indicated that the designated representative of the resident diplomatic corps was indeed informed by the authorities of the basic fact of the tragedy itself. The details, the representative was told, would be communicated later.

In the days that followed the tragedy, international aid agencies and governmental and non-governmental observers across the world pieced together a ghastly picture of the human tragedy with some gaps, but also with some common denominators. It was generally agreed, and not really contradicted by Pyongyang, that an explosion was the cause of the major accident near Ryongchong railway station, about 50 km from the national capital but nearer to the DPRK-China border. Not refuted, too, was the general impression that the DPRK's supreme leader, Kim Jong Il, had passed past the point where the disaster struck several hours earlier, while on his way back home from China, which he visited without a prior announcement.

At the time of writing, it was far from established whether a human error resulted in a collision between the two freight trains that carried highly combustible materials, or whether the massive blast was indeed sparked by contact between `live' overhead electrical wiring and some carelessly heaped explosives, said to be dynamite, on a goods wagon.

One graphic description doing the rounds immediately after the blast was that the sound and scale of the tragedy matched those of a small nuclear explosion. It now remains to be seen if "evidence" will soon "surface" about a "link'' of some kind or other between the materials that caused the rail blast and the DPRK's nuclear weapons programme. No one has yet credited North Korea with attempts to create capabilities for making miniaturised nuclear weapons, which can cause small but horrific explosions.

The shadow politics behind the monitoring of the North Korean tragedy has not, however, affected the sense of urgency that the international aid agencies have displayed in reacting to the situation at Ryongchong. While officials from the Red Cross and other agencies rushed to the scene with help or sought to render assistance in other ways, the DPRK authorities did not block the flow of such succour, even as the relevant United Nations authorities issued fervent appeals for help.

While the debris of the disaster was spewed across a 16-kilometre radius, according to one "eyewitness" account, pupils of a nearby school were counted among the dead. Initial but unofficial estimates put the number of buildings destroyed at about 1,850 and the tally of those damaged in various degrees at a much higher level. This aspect was seen as not mere collateral damage but an actual element of the crisis itself.

As politically instructive as the remote-sensing coverage by the West was the attitude of several countries towards the question of rendering help. The United States chose to underline that North Korea could indeed qualify for assistance on humanitarian grounds on this occasion, notwithstanding Pyongyang's "Stalinist" politics and "clandestine'' programmes of making and deploying weapons of mass destruction.

Japan, whose critics accuse it of being willing to play Man Friday to an increasingly beleaguered U.S. in the "war on terror", offered some political rationalisation of aid diplomacy in the DPRK context. According to Tokyo, which offered medical relief to the tune of $100,000 and dropped hints about the possibility of a bigger package, any such purely humanitarian help should not be seen as a sop to North Korea. (Japan continued to differ on the issues of Cold War-era abductions of Japanese nationals by the DPRK and Pyongyang's nuclear arms programme.)

South Korea, which misses no opportunity to reinforce its ethnic affinity with the DPRK, lost no time in offering $1-million worth of relief supplies. Confusion and an argument about the suitability of an overland route or a maritime passage for the transportation of the supplies ensued. However, despite South Korea's role as a traditional listening post in respect of events in the DPRK, Seoul sought to take a balanced view of the Ryongchong blast. This aspect stood out against the backdrop of the huge guesswork estimates that the South Korean media made about the casualties in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.

Official Seoul took a consistent line that there was no hard evidence to indicate a terrorist agenda or an assassination plot behind the blast. South Korea saw no direct link between the explosion and Kim Jong Il's train journey back home from Beijing. However, Western observers lost no time in drawing attention to the South Korean tendency, said to be more rampant in recent years, to look at the DPRK with a lot of ethnic considerations and uncritical fraternity.

It was in this context that China's response to the crisis stood out. Beijing offered help to the DPRK from the vantage position of a geopolitical neighbour. Some American critics of the DPRK, notably William C. Triplett II and others, have portrayed Pyongyang as "China's knife'' in the overall geopolitical milieu of U.S.' presence in East Asia. It is no less instructive, in this context, that Kim Jong Il, according to Pyongyang's official account, told Chinese President Hu Jintao in Beijing recently that "the DPRK remained unchanged in its main stand for [a] negotiated, peaceful, settlement of the [Korean] nuclear issue". With "denuclearisation" being the "final target", the DPRK would, in Kim's pledge, evince "patience and flexibility" during the ongoing process of six-party talks on the issue.