Ye kambakht Covid North Korea pahuncha kaise?

Raju Korti
By far the most bizarre thing about North Korea is its people who are actually oppressed don't even know they are oppressed. Irony has the dubious reputation of killing itself often in a country that pompously calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. It has only accentuated after its dilly dallying state media finally admitted the presence of Covid outbreak on its sealed soils. And it has entrusted the job of controlling the outbreak to its Army after declaring  "Severe National Emergency"; whatever that means in that country. 

For many countries, Covid as news has taken a backseat but anything that happens in North Korea is news at all times. If reports are to be believed the Iron Curtain country which shares its borders with Russia and China to the north, hasn't been able to stop the onset of Covid-19 what with tens of thousands of people infected by the virus. True to its character, Pyongyang conceded the outbreak after being in denial mode with this new isolationism forced on its already isolated populace. Bizarre can't get more bizarre than this. How does a country define a lockdown that is internationally locked down?

The state controlled media has chosen to speak the couched language of calling the  outbreak as "unspecified fever like never seen before". What happens to its 25 million population due to lack of vaccination programmes and next-to-nothing healthcare is a matter of speculation. The country has turned down offers from the international community to supply Covid vaccines including its closest ally China. There is no mistaking the inadvertent humour in the story that North Korea found it safer to seal its borders than to hazard the use of Chinese-made jabs. 

While the virus runs amuck, a lockdown would be disaster in a country that in its obsession believes it is more prudent to spend on nuclear weapons than public welfare. By conceding about the presence of Covid on its soil, the pariah state seems to have dropped subtle hints that it my be willing to accept "outside" help. But will it? Your hunches about what will happen in that country invariably turn out to be wrong when your sanity tells you they should be right.

I am not sure if China's expedient ties with North Korea will help. Their alliance has been nominal with a history of tension and antagonism for decades. That said, it has somehow managed to forestall any attempt by Pyongyang to stray from its orbit. Keeping North Korea on a tight leash is a tight-rope that China will perennially have on its hands.  

Forget China, even North Korea finds it tough to handle itself. Sample this weird piece of governance. South Korea had stopped sending fertilizers to North Korea when the latter was facing an acute shortage of fertilizers. So like everything else, a new law was enacted that made it mandatory for the citizens to collect their poop and hand it over to the authorities to sustain the country' agriculture. How they managed this can only be imagined.  

If the country fails to control the Covid surge, North Koreans may find it doing it again. For their own life!