Kim Jong Un’s Covid-19 Go-To Move—Finger Wagging

North Korean dictator has demoted officials, criticized technocrats as the country struggles with pandemic.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, centre, with his leadership group at Kim Il Sung’s mausoleum in Pyongyang last week.

Kim Jong Un, more so than his predecessors, has spread out responsibility among an elite group of North Korean government officials. Now, facing the worst home-front crisis of his nearly decadelong reign, the young dictator is making sure to share the blame.

At a Politburo meeting late last month, Mr. Kim warned that his country’s Covid-19 situation was grave. He slammed his technocrats for their “old way of thinking,” and threatened to replace them with those “fully prepared in terms of loyalty.”

North Korean state media, reporting on the meeting, didn’t specify what had gone wrong. Mr. Kim fired a variety of officials, in what was the biggest leadership shake-up in nearly a decade, according to an analysis by Tae Yong Ho, a former senior North Korean diplomat who defected and is now an opposition lawmaker in South Korea.

One of the demoted appears to have been North Korea’s top military official, Ri Pyong Chol. On Thursday, state media published photographs of Mr. Kim at Kim Il Sung’s mausoleum, a visit marking a major holiday on the anniversary of his grandfather’s death. Mr. Ri appeared in plain clothes and stood two rows back from his customary spot next to the North Korean leader.

The overhaul was in part due to an effort by Mr. Kim to reshape the way the North Korean government operates.

“Kim Jong Un is rewriting the internal dynamics of the regime,” said Ken Gause, a North Korea leadership expert at CNA, a Virginia-based nonprofit think tank. “This is about trying to make the system work better, though he is very upset that it’s not working.”

Mr. Kim has broken from a couple of ruling traditions in North Korea—an air of infallibility and a tendency to micromanage. Unlike his father and grandfather, the North Korean leader has allowed that he may be more human than deity. He has admitted mistakes and apologized. He shed tears at a military parade last year. He even allowed the country’s state media to air remarks lamenting that he had lost weight amid the country’s food crisis.

At the same time, he has given subordinates more authority to manage daily affairs in the military, economy and elsewhere. He has attended fewer marquee events and delegated more site-inspection visits. Photos of North Korean leaders touring newly built sites have long been a fixture of the country’s propaganda.

“Kim Jong Un has been indicating for a while that he’s not the only person leading this country, that there is a group of people in charge,” said Ramon Pacheco Pardo, KF-VUB Korea chair at the Brussels School of Governance. “But there are people who have not done their job right and now he’s blaming them.”

The grievance that led to him to lambaste top officials late last month appears to be linked with false reporting of the country’s military rice reserves, according to the analysis by Mr. Tae, the South Korean lawmaker.

Mr. Kim had likely ordered the military to tap into its own rice reserves for public distribution, Mr. Tae wrote, and the actual supply was lower than what senior officials had reported. Typically, the military would just turn to China for a quick replenishment, but the borders remain closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“If Kim realized this time that he had been receiving false reports, it would be an incident calling for anger and agitation,” Mr. Tae wrote.

On Thursday, South Korea’s spy agency told lawmakers that Mr. Kim’s wrath may have resulted from poor rice-reserve management, plus delays in opening a new disinfection center near the Chinese border.

The isolated country has grown even more insular during the pandemic, fearful of how severe outbreaks could ravage its decrepit health system. That has choked off critical cross-border commerce with China. Pyongyang doesn’t appear interested in nuclear talks with Washington that could relax sanctions and ease some of the economic pressure.

Demanding better policy implementation—and as a result, shifting fault away from himself—represents one of the few options Mr. Kim has left.

The North Korean leader needed to send a message to his ruling class about accountability, said Lee Ho-ryung, a senior research fellow at the Seoul-based Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a state-run think tank.

“If Kim does not get immediate support from his elite group, he cannot manage and reconcile the incremental complaints of the North Koreans,” Ms. Lee said.

Until Covid-19 vaccines become widely available, the Kim regime is effectively stuck in place, since reopening borders even partially would be too risky due to infrastructure vulnerabilities, widespread malnutrition and an elderly population, said Jiho Cha, an expert on North Korea’s healthcare system.

“They don’t have any other option but to keep the borders shut,” said Dr. Cha, who is a global health scholar at the University of Manchester.

North Korea has applied to receive vaccinations with the Covax program but has yet to receive any doses.

Paralyzed by pandemic countermeasures, North Korea’s on-the-ground situation has grown harsher. Mr. Kim’s recent weight loss—estimated by Seoul’s spy agency at between 22 and 44 pounds—was packaged by state media as an emblem of the nation’s continuing struggles. Prior estimates put Mr. Kim’s weight at 310 pounds or more.

North Korea’s food supply has been crimped by last year’s summer floods that hurt agricultural production. But prices for rice and corn haven’t surged, according to Kang Mi Jin, a defector who monitors the country’s economy and regularly speaks with North Koreans.

Times are tight, though, with some having to sell their motorcycles or air conditioners for cash, she added. Informal marketplaces, where many North Koreans make a living, have seen their selling hours reduced as the venues are disinfected in the mornings, and their profits are limited by government price fixing, said Ms. Kang, who works for Daily NK, a Seoul-based publication.

“But if I ask them what food they’re putting on the table, it’s not much different than before,” Ms. Kang said.

Wall Street Journal