North Korea’s Kim Jong-un In Fight of His Life Against Unseen Enemy

SEOUL — North Korea’s leader is waging the fight of his life against a pandemic that could eventually prove the undoing of the dynasty that’s ruled the North since 1945.As the number of cases of “fever” mount steadily, Kim Jong-un is struggling to convince the North’s 26 million citizens he’s not one bit to blame for splurging on nukes and missiles while his people face the danger of Covid sweeping the country.“Kim Jong-un is worried since he has much to answer for in the regime’s failure to prevent this dangerous situation,” a retired senior diplomat in the American embassy in Seoul, Evans Revere, says. “Kim’s reliance on lockdowns and border closures to keep the disease at bay has failed — spectacularly. “Now, Mr. Revere says, Mr. Kim “faces an explosive growth of cases and deaths in a country that has failed to vaccinate its population, and which has a notoriously primitive public health system. This will not end well; Kim knows it.”Mr. Kim is pursuing a multi-track strategy to maintain absolute power over the North’s 26 million citizens. He’s got the 1.2-million-man Korean People’s Army going after anyone who dares doubt or criticize the way he’s been running the country; he’s holding health officials directly responsible for enabling the spread of the virus, and he’s making a show of suddenly getting medicine on pharmacy and hospital shelves that are largely bare.“Having lashed out at his civilian bureaucracy for their shortcomings in managing the disease, he has nowhere else to turn,” Mr. Revere says. “The military and security services will also be tasked with ensuring that Kim’s leadership remains firm and unquestioned. But as infections rise and deaths spike, there are bound to be rumblings of concern, dismay, and possibly even veiled criticism in some quarters.”In the quest “for scapegoats,” Mr. Revere says, “he will of course refrain from looking in the mirror.” The desperation is seen in senseless claims carried by the North’s Korean Central News agency and Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the ruling Workers’ Party, of which Mr. Kim is general secretary. They’ve been crediting soldiers and civilian officials with getting much needed medicine back on the shelves of pharmacies they say are now running 24 hours a day.In a dispatch just disseminated in English, KCNA makes the astounding claim that “all pharmaceutical and Koryo medicine-processing factories in the country have produced medicines and supplied them to treatment and prevention organs and citizens.”Foreign visitors, before North Korea closed its borders with China in early 2020 after the virus was first detected at Wuhan, told me North Korea did not begin to have supplies and equipment to combat other basic ailments, much less Covid.Confounding reality, the dispatch insists, “Health workers across the country strive to trace and quarantine all persons with fever and abnormal symptoms and treat them, focusing their efforts on hygienic information, medical examination and treatment.”Breathlessly, the KCNA dispatch goes on, “They have also minimized the human losses by reasonably introducing the scientific treatment tactics and methods in cooperation with the central emergency epidemic prevention sector and pushed ahead with the work to timely cope with the spread of the epidemic while keenly watching the tendency of spread of the epidemic.”Against reports that North Korea lacks basic supplies, KCNA claims “Officials of the epidemic prevention sector strive to ensure the quality of disinfectants and increase their production so as to supply in time enough disinfectants to the epidemic prevention posts and relevant areas.”Lost in the propaganda blitz is that over-the-counter remedies for Covid are not available anywhere in the world. The pharmacies had to put on their best face, however, after Mr. Kim went on a walkabout inspecting at least one pharmacy.That was after North Korea’s state media reported him telling a politburo meeting that pharmacies in the capital were “ill-equipped to provide medicine amid a severe COVID-19 outbreak.” There was no word of the state of care outside the capital, home of the elite in government, the armed forces and the ruling party, but visitors have previously said they basically had little or no medicine at all while hospitals and clinics had mostly ceased to function.Missing from the propaganda was that Mr. Kim has rejected offers of vaccines and other medical aid from South Korea and other countries. In fact, the word “vaccine” simply does not show up anywhere in any of the reports from Pyongyang about the pandemic.Nor is there any indication that North Korea has ventilators needed to ensure the flow of oxygen for critical patients. If such equipment is anywhere in the country, it’s undoubtedly available only to Mr. Kim and his inner circle. He’s not asking for donations from abroad — and has yet to respond to offers from South Korea.The problem is that Mr. Kim not only does not want the North to be in the role of a beggar state but also cannot stand the prospect of foreign experts and observers descending en masse, getting to know too much about a country and a system that’s notoriously closed to the outside world.After having denied the existence of a single case for more than two years since the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China, Mr. Kim now seems to be using the news as a way to demonstrate his power. Those whom he blames for permitting the virus into the country are sure to lose their jobs if not their lives in what’s likely to be a typical crackdown.In contending with his own bureaucrats as well as a frightened citizenry, Mr. Kim appears to be regulating the type and extent of news carried by his media. The latest report is that 1.5 million cases of “the fever” have been reported and at least 50 have died. It’s assumed “the fever” is a reference to Covid, but there’s no confirmation.“North Korea’s claim to be virus-free for the past two-plus years was never credible,” Mr. Evans said. “So, we should be skeptical about the regime’s statistics. Statistics in North Korea play the same role they do in all communist/authoritarian regimes: they make the officials who publish them look good,”Despite the risks of a reaction against him, however, Mr. Kim is expected to weather the storm while thousands of his people are left to fight for survival with no reliable source of medical care.The pandemic is “unlikely to undermine Kim’s grip on power,” Mr. Revere says. “Remember, this is a regime that saw hundreds of thousands of Koreans die during of starvation of the ‘Arduous March’ era — the time in the 1990s when 2 million North Koreans are believed to have starved to death or died of some terrible disease, without any negative consequences for the leadership’s grip on power.”

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un In Fight of His Life Against Unseen Enemy

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