Covid-19: "We must help North Korea to avoid a humanitarian crime"

Pierre Rigoulot is director of the Institute of Social History and author of

To put an end to North Korea

The Manifesto of the Communist Party in the eyes of history (

After having denied any attack on his country by the Covid epidemic, Kim Jong Un has just recognized the first cases there but does not envisage any other major response than the quarantine of all the inhabitants.

Most of them, it is true, are accustomed to not being able to leave their country except clandestinely and to going from one place to another, inside, only with the authorization of the police.

It is therefore possible that the epidemic has not hitherto affected in a significant way what is called “the Hermit kingdom”.

Movements are exceptional and controlled.

The diplomats and privileged officials of the economic sector who enter and leave the country are few in number and undoubtedly…vaccinated!

North Korea, however, went further, saying it was completely spared the scourge.

And who cast doubt on this almost miraculous protection was reviled.

It was to ignore the image that the North Korean leadership wants to project of itself: that of a perfect state, led by a dynasty of political geniuses.

It was in keeping with the official golden legend that Covid could do no harm to this model state.

Wanting to help the population revealed an evil nature by trying to make them benefit, north of the 38th parallel, from the experience acquired in the so-called Western world, from its medicines, its vaccines.

Pierre Rigoulot and André Senik

To assert that things could change would have been to acknowledge that the perfection of the regime was questionable.

It was to side with the enemy, American imperialism, bent on destroying the world of popular regimes, like those of Pyongyang, Moscow or Peking.

Worse: wanting to help the population revealed an evil nature by trying to make them benefit, north of the 38th parallel, from the experience acquired in the so-called Western world, from its medicines, its vaccines.

But the coalman is master in his own house, as Goebbels said, and there could be no question of letting foreigners choose the methods of a humanitarian action which they nevertheless proposed to carry out voluntarily.

Doctors Without Borders, Doctors of the World and Action Against Hunger had, more than twenty years ago, given up helping the North Korean population, which at that time already lacked medical care and food, because the doctors and nurses sent by these associations could not come into contact with the sick as they wished.

Faced with the seriousness of the epidemic and the number of cases and deaths due to Covid, Kim Jong Un has temporarily given up the myth of the ideal city under the enlightened leadership of a brilliant leader.

And on May 13, the official news agency announced that Kim Jong Un, still as brilliant as ever, had identified and denounced a weak point in the prevention system and admitted that nearly 190,000 patients were affected.

Their number, today, would have increased tenfold.

Shouldn't the WHO try to impose a general vaccination of the population and, if this is refused, denounce what should be called the “humanitarian crime” of Kim Jong Un?

Pierre Rigoulot and André Senik

These estimates are naturally to be taken with a grain of salt.

The real problem is that the epidemic, belatedly admitted by the authorities, strikes a population that has long been weakened by the lack of food and the lack of medical equipment;

a population to which, stubbornly, the said authorities have so far not allowed access to any of the vaccines and remedies that the hated foreigner offers them.

Would the whole world be helpless in the face of such tyranny?

The UN and its World Health Organization have expressed their concern and offered their help, but if the silence of the Pyongyang authorities continues, could they not put pressure on Communist China to obtain from its North Korean protege to let the world come to the aid of its people in danger?

Shouldn't the WHO try to impose a general vaccination of the population and, if it was refused, denounce what should be called the "humanitarian crime" of Kim Jong Un?

To resign oneself to abandoning the people of North Korea without making any attempt to come to their medical aid and without denouncing a regime which opposes health assistance to people in danger, would be sending a desperate signal to all those who know that the North Koreans are the victims of the worst of the totalitarian regimes that exist today there and elsewhere.