Kim Jong Un sacks North Korean officials over mysterious ‘crisis’ in Covid battle

Kim Jong Un has launched a blistering verbal attack on his top officials for triggering a “great crisis” in North Korea’s anti-Covid campaign.

According to the state-run KCNA news agency, Kim told a politburo meeting of his Workers’ Party yesterday that by “neglecting important decisions by the party that called for organisational, material and science and technological measures to support prolonged anti-epidemic work in the face of a global health crisis, the officials in charge have caused a grave incident that created a huge crisis for the safety of the country and its people”.

The North Korean leader “is also said to have replaced several politburo members and state officials at the meeting”, Sky News reports.

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The exact nature of the “grave incident” remains unclear, but “analysts believe Kim’s outburst indicates North Korea is no longer free of Covid-19”, The Guardian says.

The hermit state “has told the World Health Organization it has not found a single case of Covid-19 after testing more than 30,000 people”, the newspaper continues. But the “claim has been greeted with scepticism by the international community”.

Kim’s accusations against officials appear to be “a rare sign of the pandemic's severity in North Korea”, says the BBC.

The notoriously secretive nation closed its borders with China and Russia at the beginning of the pandemic, and imposed tight restrictions on movement and travel.

But while those measures appear to have proved insufficient to keep out Covid, “there is no possibility that North Korea will ever admit to an infection”, according to Hong Min, a senior analyst at Seoul’s Korea Institute for National Unification think-tank.

“Even if there were mass transmissions, the North will definitely not reveal such developments and will continue to push forward an anti-virus campaign it has claimed to be the greatest,” Hong said. “But it's also clear that something significant happened and it was big enough to warrant a reprimanding of senior officials.”

Chan Il Ahn, a North Korean defector who is now a researcher at the World Institute for North Korea Studies, insists that the public rebuke “basically means North Korea has confirmed cases”.

“The fact that the politburo discussed this, and that the KCNA reported it, signals Pyongyang is probably in need of international aid,” he told Agence France-Presse. “Otherwise they would not have done this, as it inevitably involves acknowledging the regime’s own failure in its anti-epidemic efforts.”

The closing of North Korea’s borders, coupled with international sanctions on the rogue state, has “led to food shortages and a worsening economy”, says the BBC.

Kim told a meeting of senior officials earlier this month that the “food situation is now getting tense”. And his country is also facing shortages of “medicines and warnings of rising unemployment and homelessness”, The Guardian reports.

Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, told the paper that Kim’s latest intervention “indicates that health conditions are already deteriorating inside the country”.

“Kim will likely find scapegoats for the incident, purging disloyal officials and blaming their ideological lapses”, Easley added. “This may provide Pyongyang justification for demanding that citizens hunker down more, but it could also be political preparation for accepting vaccines from abroad.”

North Korea has been allocated nearly two million doses of vaccines through Covax, the global vaccine-sharing programme, but deliveries have been delayed owing to global shortages.