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North spurns trucked goods
written by: Lee Young-jong, 26-Apr-04
 North Korea refused yesterday to open up its heavily guarded border for the delivery of relief goods from South Korea's Red Cross. It also turned down offers to dispatch South Korean medical teams and a hospital ship to aid persons injured in the explosion and fire Thursday at a rail station in Yongcheon, near North Korea's border with China.
Pyeongyang asked Seoul to send the goods by sea through the port of Nampo instead. It said that it had a sufficient number of medical teams already operating in the area of the accident. It said it still wanted to meet with South Korean officials at Gaeseong today to discuss relief measures.
North Korea's Red Cross Society sent a telephone message to its South Korean counterpart at about noon yesterday through the truce village of Panmunjeom. The North said it would accept the goods offered by the South, but wanted them delivered to Nampo, roughly 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the disaster site where at least 160 persons died.
"North Korea seems to be worried about the internal impact of the overland delivery of goods," a unification ministry official said. Nampo is the delivery point for rice and fertilizer shipments from South Korea.
Another ministry official said the North would probably ask for construction equipment and material for rebuilding projects rather than emergency medical aid from here.
North Korea's unwillingness to allow South Korean relief workers to cross the border raised concerns that the materials would arrive too late to be of much good. "How to send the goods, instead of what and how much to send, has become an even more difficult issue," a unification ministry official said.
According to the government, the North requested that relief goods be sent on a ship, the Trade Fortune, which sails between Incheon and Nampo regularly.
The ship is scheduled to leave for the North on Thursday, but poor weather conditions could cause delays, another official warned, saying that the shipment would not reach the victims until at least May 1.
"Sea travel from Incheon to Nampo takes more than 20 hours, and loading and unloading will take a lot of time," a Red Cross official in Seoul said. "Taking account of the road conditions in the North, moving the goods from Nampo to Pyeongyang and then to Yongcheon will also take a lot of time."
The government had originally planned to send $800,000 worth of first aid kits, medicine and medical equipment using the inter-Korean highway from Munsan to Gaeseong in North Korea. The highway connecting Gaeseong to Yongcheon was in good enough condition to allow the trucks to arrive in Yongcheon within a day, Seoul estimated, meaning that the first shipments would have been in victims' hands by late today.
Published in: Joong Ang Daily
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