Seoul struggles to find South Asia missing

Jon · Korean Citizen Joined: Mar 19, 2004 Posts: 525

The government is still struggling to track down nearly 300 Korean nationals believed to have been in or near tsunami-hit areas in southern Asia, and has so far confirmed only 12 Korean dead.
Amid rising criticism over the government's inability to confirm the whereabouts of Koreans in the disaster regions, Foreign Ministry officials said that the work has been hampered by rain and floods.

As of yesterday evening, apart from the 12 fatalities, there are eight Koreans listed as missing feared dead, and a total of 276 other South Koreans still unaccounted for.

Many remain confused by the government's distinction between missing and "unaccounted for," and officials explained the latter term is for people reported as being near the region at the time.

"We do not classify those people as officially missing, because reports on them state they were only 'presumably' in the region, which in most cases include areas that were not affected by the disaster," Lee Joon-gyu, director general of the Foreign Ministry's Consular Affairs Bureau, told The Korea Herald.

[img:212f5ec1a7]http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/data/img_dir/2005/01/04/200501040008.gif[/img:212f5ec1a7]
Customers join a bazaar jointly promoted by the Korean National Red Cross and Hyundai Department Store in Seoul yesterday to help victims of the earthquake-tsunami disaster in southern Asia. [The Korea Herald]

As of yesterday afternoon, the ministry's call center said it had had a total of 1,355 reports of Korean nationals out of contact or thought to be in the southern Asia countries hit by tsuanmis spawned by the giant earthquake off Sumatra early on Dec. 26.

The ministry said 1,079 have been confirmed to be either safe or unaffected by the catastrophe.

"But the eight people officially announced as missing are highly likely to have been affected by the disaster, and we have confirmed that they were at stricken sites at the time," Lee said.

"We're doing the best we can to find and confirm their safety but the process isn't as quick as we would like it to be."

Diplomatic sources in the region stress the difficulties in identifying the dead.

"The number of dead could go up substantially in the coming days or weeks, because the bodies are decaying and it is getting more and more difficult to identify them," a diplomatic source said. "Additional deaths in the Aceh region (in Indonesia) will bring the toll up quickly, and Koreans may possibly be accounted for there."

There is some criticism why the South Korean ambassador to Thailand, Yoon Ji-joon, was slow to visit the disaster-stricken area.

Some government critics say the ambassador was slow to take hold of the situation, and feel much more work to protect nationals could have been done in the early stages of the disaster.

Ambassador Yoon only traveled to Phuket after Kwon Sun-chil, the South Korean consul general to Bangkok, first visited the popular tourist site and reported back on the desperate situation.

"It is very difficult for any efficiency there at the moment due to poor communication conditions in the devastated areas," one official said.

(bluelle@heraldm.com)

By Choi Soung-ah