Kim Jong-un’s command looks vulnerable to Covid

If you think lockdown has been a strain, you should try it in a state that has been battened down for decades. Bingeing on television in Kim Jong-un’s hermit kingdom has just become more dangerous, food is disappearing fast and the spread of coronavirus is a state secret. And lest his put-upon subjects get the crazy idea that life could be better elsewhere, the North Korean leader has declared a culture war on South Korea.

A new law provides for between five and 15 years in a labour camp for watching or owning bootlegged South Korean films and K-pop videos, which are smuggled into the country via China. There’s two years of hard labour for those caught “speaking, writing or singing” in South Korean style.

North Korea shows off a gigantic new intercontinental ballistic missile in a military parade marking the 75th anniversary of the regime. Picture: KCNA via AFP.

Young women in North Korea have been ordered to call their boyfriends “comrade”, rather than endearments like “honey” which they have picked up from South Korean soap operas. Access to the global internet has been banned; television is pre-set to North Korean state channels. Squads of vigilantes stop young men who experiment with non-pudding basin haircuts or girls with short skirts.

The fact is that Kim, the Supreme Leader, is struggling. Although the pandemic does not figure in the official media, he has closed the border with China, declaring it a cordon sanitaire. International exchanges have dried up; many foreign embassies have sent their diplomats away.

Last week Kim broke his silence about Covid-19 and said there had been an unspecified “grave incident” related to the illness. He fired two members of the inner circle.

Last week Kim broke his silence about Covid-19 and said there had been an unspecified ‘grave incident’ related to the illness. Picture AFP.

Since China is North Korea’s main trading partner and Kim’s route around international sanctions, the economy is floundering, worse than at any time since the disastrous year of 1990. Again Kim uses code to admit this to the people, telling them to brace for a repeat of the Arduous March, the years of famine in the 1990s. Up to one million North Koreans died in the famine, many reduced to eating weeds.

When Kim took over from his father almost a decade ago, the first thing he did was to promise meat on the plate. Now, though, little fuel is entering North Korea, fertiliser stocks are running out. NGOs are no longer allowed to enter the country or operate within it so there is a chronic shortage of medicine. Typhoons and flooding last year have added to Kim’s worry list. “The people’s food situation is now getting tense,” he admitted to leading members of the Workers’ Party. Perhaps, western analysts speculate, Kim’s recent dramatic weight loss is an act of solidarity with his belt-tightening nation. If so, it would be a first. Kim’s more natural reflex is to order in a new Mercedes from shadowy sanctions-busters in Singapore.

Kim’s reaction to crises is usually to buy another Mercedes.

A more likely explanation is that the drinking and smoking supremo has been advised by a brave doctor that his vital statistics (1.75m tall, 136kg on the scales, type 2 diabetic, 37 years of age) made him a Covid candidate. Unlike other dictators at bay, Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, say, or Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, he has a highly developed sense of mortality.

That is the price of being a dynastic dictator. Tomorrow he will visit the grave of his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, in the Kumsusan Palace in Pyongyang and remind North Koreans that they are stuck with a Kim whether they like it or not. If toppled, both Maduro and Lukashenko could count on spending their twilight years in a grand dacha outside Moscow.

In North Korea, though, the key metric of the regime is the longevity of the leader. Little wonder that Kim travels with his own portable toilet - he is said to be terrified that western spies could get hold of stool specimens and draw conclusions about the state of his health. An unstable regime with an expanding nuclear arsenal - submarine-launched ballistic missiles have been on display this year - needs at the very least to have a rational leader, and one that is not desperately trigger-happy because of limited life expectancy.

Kim Jong-un was noticeably fatter in February, when he and wife Ri Sol Ju attended a performance celebrating Kim Jong Il’s birth. Picture: KCNA via AFP.

There’s a way of piecing together Kim’s movements since the beginning of the pandemic that suggests something’s up. At a parade in October (more missiles) he started to well up when he conceded that North Korea was having a hard time.

In 2020 he had five absences, each of more than 20 days. This year, so far, there have been two long periods out of public view. Crucially, at the party congress last January, the party created the role of First Secretary of the Central Committee who would be allowed to represent the Supreme Leader. Was Kim after some down time? Covid sheltering? Or, perhaps, depressed?

After all, the high times have passed. The execution of rivals within the family may make him secure for a while but North Korea’s misery is of his own making. Gone too is the brief moment in the sun when he stood up to Donald Trump and found himself gratifyingly hailed as the president’s good friend. Now even Xi Jinping doesn’t have much time for him. Kim’s fate depends on some kind of understanding between the US and China and that’s likely to be a long time coming.

One thing’s for sure: Kim Jong-un, who can have generals shot with a click of his fingers, who can determine how his subjects dress and speak to each other, is not really in command. He can’t drive back Covid; he can’t bring prosperity to his benighted country. All he can do is test missiles and cause a bang.

The Times