Kim Jong-un’s influential sister has launched a stinging verbal attack on South Korea’s foreign minister for questioning North Korean claims that the country does not have a single case of Covid-19.
Kim Yo-jong, the North Korean leader’s younger sister, described the comments by Kang Kyung-wha as “reckless” and accused her of seeking to damage already strained ties between Pyongyang and Seoul.
Kang said last weekend that it was hard to believe the North’s insistence that it was free of the coronavirus a year after the outbreak began.
It is impossible to verify North Korea’s claims, but experts have said it is highly unlikely that the country has escaped the virus, despite tightening its borders and banning international air travel in late January.
Kim Yo-jong said in a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency on Wednesday: “It can be seen from the reckless remarks made by [Kang] without any consideration of the consequences that she is too eager to further chill the frozen relations between North and South Korea .”
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Kim, a senior official in the ruling Workers’ party whom some describe as the regime’s de facto second-in-command, added: “Her real intention is very clear. We will never forget her words and she might have to pay dearly for it.”
Kang told a forum in Bahrain on Saturday that the pandemic had “made North Korea more North Korea – that is, more closed, very top-down decision-making process where there is very little debate on their measures in dealing with Covid-19”.
She added: “They still say they do not have any cases, which is hard to believe. So, all signs are the regime is very intensely focused on controlling the disease that they say they do not have.”
North Korea is known to have taken drastic measures to prevent an outbreak and spare its fragile health infrastructure. It has closed its borders with China and Russia and sent home diplomats. Tens of thousands of people have been quarantined as the country attempts to isolate what it has described as “suspected” cases.
Plummeting trade via its border with China has damaged the North’s fragile economy, which was already suffering from the fallout from international sanctions imposed in response to its missile and nuclear weapons programmes.
The North has admitted it is facing “multiple crises” due to the pandemic, as well as a spate of natural disasters last summer, and US-led sanctions.
Last week, KCNA said the country had imposed “top-class emergency measures” in Pyongyang, including the closure of restaurants and other public places, and restrictions on people’s movements around the capital.
Relations between the two Koreas have deteriorated this year after a series of incidents along their heavily armed border.
In June, the North blew up a liaison office set up to improve communications with the South in a row over defectors’ plans to send anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets across the border.
In September, Kim Jong-un issued a rare public apology after North Korean soldiers shot dead a South Korean official who had drifted across the countries’ maritime border, possibly in an attempt to defect.
South Korean intelligence agency claimed last month it had foiled attempts by North Korean hackers to disrupt attempts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine.