korean unification studies

The reported death toll from the North Korean floods has doubled to around 600 people, according to the North Korean official news agency, KCNA. Thousands more are reported to be injured.

The material losses include more than 20 percent of rice paddies and 15 percent of corn-growing areas, according to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. There is also severe damage to infrastructure, including roads and railroads, as a result of the floods and subsequent landslides. North Korea’s mining industry, one of the few bright spots in the economy, following high demand and investment from China, has come to a standstill.

However, there are still doubts in the minds of some….

The New York Sun is reporting:

U.N. officials have been instructed by Secretary-General Ban to independently assess the damage from floods caused by heavy rains during the last 10 days; North Korea has claimed that at least 300 are dead or missing and that 300,000 have been left homeless. While not dismissing the disaster in a disaster-prone country, critics say Pyongyang has good reasons to make the flood’s aftermath look worse than it actually is.

In recent years, the communist regime “has tended to exaggerate losses from natural disasters to obtain as much outside aid as possible,” a Seoul-based Korea University Professor, Nam Sung-Wook, told the French news agency AFP yesterday.

There have also been several reports alluding to North Korea’s insurance claims on certain projects that have been damaged in the floods. These are mostly just rehashes of articles that appeared towards the end of 2006 and early 2007, regarding North Korean insurance fraud. Much of North Korea’s insurance is controlled by one state-owned firm, the Korea National Insurance Corporation (KNIC), also known as the Korea Foreign Insurance Company, which purchases reinsurance coverage abroad for risks that it assumes in the domestic market. The role of the state in insurance claims presents a red flag to many who question the reliability of such claims.

It will be interesting to see what was insured, after all, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that the floods caused a lot of damage… Images from North Korean state TV that have not been widely used in the western media are available on the Ministry of Unification weblog.