North Korea spurns South’s doctor offer and asks for TVs

APPALLED by the carnage of last week’s train explosion in North Korea, South Korea quickly offered to send doctors to treat child victims in crowded hospitals, their charred faces wrapped in dirty bandages and without the intravenous drips essential to burn patients.

But North Korea rejected the offer and instead it handed the South a list of "relief goods" including 50 colour TV sets which it wants unloaded in an area far from the explosion site.

A South Korean freighter sailed for the North yesterday to deliver its first aid shipment: 1 million worth of medicines, blankets, instant noodles, bottled water and clothes.

The freighter will unload its cargo at Nampo, a port outside the North's capital, Pyongyang, because North Korea refused to open its tightly sealed border to South Korean trucks.

That means the relief will not reach the victims in Ryongchon until late today or early tomorrow a week after the disaster.

The deadly explosion in Ryongchon, a town of 130,000 near the Chinese border, killed at least 161 people, half of them schoolchildren, and left thousands injured or homeless.

About 370 victims remained hospitalised, two-thirds of them children. Many suffered severe burns and eye injuries from the blast's shockwave of glass, rubble and heat.

Meanwhile, the North intensified its appeals for aid. Property damage from the explosion, as powerful as 100 one-tonne bombs, was estimated at $356 million, the official North Korean news agency KCNA said. It said many victims were left "deaf and blind" by the blast.

The disaster stirred sympathy among South Koreans, some with relatives in the impoverished North.

But many are also frustrated by the North's attitude toward the South's aid offer, and see it as a reminder of the mistrust that still divides the two Koreas.

Photos and video footage from the site show patients without proper medical care in a country where doctors are forced to operate on patients without anaesthesia.

"It's a sad sight: children without proper care a week after the explosion," said Chun Wook, an assistant professor at Seoul's Hangang Sacred Heart Hospital. "It is extremely important to provide quick treatment to burns patients. The first few days are critical."

Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who worked in the North before authorities expelled him in late 2000, said some North Korean doctors use ordinary razor blades for surgery and empty beer bottles as drips.

"North Korea blocks trucks with South Korean aid at the inner Korean border while desperate children die," Dr Vollertsen said.