How Bad Are North Korea’s Floods?

Even while using missile launches and its latest nuclear test to project strength abroad, North Korea has been grappling with its vulnerability to natural disasters at home.

Major flooding, sparked by Typhoon Lionrock in late August, left many people dead or missing, homes washed away and farmland wrecked across the far north of the country.

What’s unclear is the exact extent of the devastation in the secretive country’s remote and impoverished North Hamyong Province. Using figures provided by Pyongyang, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has reported 138 people dead and 400 missing. It has estimated that some 107,000 people have been displaced.

Representatives from UNICEF and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies who were able to visit some affected areas have reported a dire situation. (The World Food Program did not respond to a request for comment).

“The size and scope of the emergency is greater than originally thought and is much more complex given how geographically widespread and remote/isolated the affected communities are,” said a UN report from the scene.

The team complained that many areas remained inaccessible, hampering their efforts to assess the damage.

Despite its reputation for portraying North Korea as heaven on earth, the state media certainly has not downplayed the disaster. In fact, it has labeled the situation the “worst disaster” since the country’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule at the end of World War II.

This extreme portrayal, from a country regularly hit with serious flooding, has prompted suspicions that Pyongyang could be exaggerating the situation to extract more aid from an international community increasingly beset by donor fatigue.

Pyongyang has manipulated global perceptions of its natural disasters before. In 2011, the Associated Press was forced to retract a Korean Central News Agency-supplied photo of flood damage in Pyongyang after learning it had been digitally altered.

“North Korea claims that these are the worst floods since World War II, but after floods in 2007, North Korea claimed that hundreds of people were dead or missing, and that 300,000 were homeless,” said Joshua Stanton, author of the blog One Free Korea, told The Diplomat. “Take any claim that this is the worst flooding in decades with a grain of salt on the numerical evidence alone.”

Stanton said assessing the scale of the disaster would likely be complicated by the proximity of affected areas to one of the country’s notorious penal labor colonies, Camp No.12 in Hoeryong.

“Not only would Pyongyang never allow foreign aid workers near those places to do assessments, it’s unlikely that U.N. agencies would have the courage to ask,” he said.

Stephan Haggard, an analyst at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that while the impact of the flood was “clearly large,” it was also being exaggerated considering that floods in 1995 precipitated a famine that killed up to a million people.

“First, while the floods are clearly serious it is important to underline that they have not primarily hit the breadbasket of the country; as my colleague Marc Noland says, this is West Virginia that has been flooded not Kansas,” Haggard said. “The displacement and costs are great, but probably not with the longer-term effects that have occurred in prior floods that hit food-growing regions.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an aid worker, who hadn’t been to the affected areas but had direct knowledge of the international relief efforts, described the situation as extremely pressing.

“There are just a lot of factors that, to me, add up to a very serious situation in the North,” said the relief worker, noting the significance of soldiers being pulled off construction work in Pyongyang for aid efforts.

While declining to comment on whether the floods really ranked among the worst in the country’s history, the charity worker challenged the idea that Pyongyang was playing up the disaster, noting that its initial reports were relatively restrained and it had declined to make a direct global appeal for aid.

Getting a true handle on the damage would be extremely difficult due to the inaccessibility of the region, the aid worker added.

“[W]e are talking four days, of 8-10 hours a day of travel on rough roads just to get there,” the worker, who has years of experience inside the country, said. “And then you are traveling around the region on even worse roads, trying to get to the places you need to see... that’s the context. There’s a whole practical side that makes it very, very difficult, not to mention whatever the sensitivities are up in the region that may be affecting what they’re going to let you see or not see.”