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.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘UNWAVERING ALLIANCE’: The US Department of State said that China’s actions during military drills with Russia were not conducive to regional peace and stability The US on Tuesday criticized China over alleged radar deployments against Japanese military aircraft during a training exercise last week, while Tokyo and Seoul yesterday scrambled jets after Chinese and Russian military aircraft conducted joint patrols near the two countries. The incidents came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triggered a dispute with Beijing last month with her remarks on how Tokyo might react to a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan. “China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said late on Tuesday, referring to the radar incident. “The US-Japan alliance is stronger and more
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS