SEOUL: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un slammed his cabinet’s “irresponsible” handling of flooding, blaming them for recent storm damage in the isolated country, state media reported Tuesday (Aug 22).
Tropical Storm Khanun made landfall earlier this month in the North, a country where natural disasters can be devastating due to weak infrastructure and widespread deforestation, which increases vulnerability to flooding.
A damaged embankment and inadequate drainage system resulted in seawater flooding more than 560 hectares of land, including key rice paddies, according to Pyongyang’s state media.
Images in state media showed Kim standing knee-deep in a flooded paddy field in the area in Nampho, with a report in the official Korean Central News Agency saying he “seriously blamed” top officials for their “very irresponsible neglect of duties”.
Kim said the recent damage was “not a calamity caused by natural disasters but a human disaster by irresponsibility … of the loafers”, KCNA said.
The leader particularly singled out Premier Kim Tok Hun for failing to prevent the damage.
“The premier looked round the site once or twice with the attitude of an onlooker,” the report said.
In recent years, KCNA added, “the administrative and economic discipline of the Kim Tok Hun Cabinet has got out of order more seriously”, and that they were “spoiling all the state economic work”.
Kim also gave orders “to ferret out the responsible organs and the persons concerned and … sternly punish them”, KCNA said.
In the state media images, Kim can be seen giving instructions to officials who were also standing in the flooded field.
The officials looked sombre as some of them appeared to be dutifully taking notes of his orders.
But Kim last week praised his military for their patriotism as they helped salvage the crops in typhoon-stricken farms in Kangwon Province.
The premier “left the recovery work almost to the army, organising it in a poor way”, leader Kim said, according to KCNA.
Given Pyongyang’s strong rhetoric, a “significant overhaul of the North’s cabinet appears inevitable”, Cheong Seong-chang of the Center for North Korea Studies at the Sejong Institute told AFP.
Source: CNA
