NORTH KOREA

North Korean leaders meet in Pyongyang amid coronavirus denials

April 10, 2020

Pyongyang plans to hold a session of the Supreme People’s Assembly, its rubber-stamp legislature, on this date. Analysts say this will involve gathering almost 700 of the secretive nation’s leaders in one spot even as many other countries have mandated bans on meetings because of the coronavirus pandemic.

"If it goes ahead, it would be the ultimate show of [North Korea’s] confidence in managing the coronavirus situation," Rachel Minyoung Lee, of the North Korea monitoring website NK News, said on Twitter on Mar 21, when the date of the session was announced.

There have been no reported cases of coronavirus in North Korea, but experts have cast doubt on this. North Korea borders China, where the virus emerged in December, and South Korea, which has experienced a major outbreak.

According to Daily NK, a South Korean news organisation, 180 North Korean soldiers died in January and February from symptoms that may have been caused by the coronavirus, and that approximately 3,700 soldiers were under quarantine.

A Daily NK source inside North Korea’s military reported on Mar 6 that the military’s medical corps had sent a report to military leaders detailing the impact of Covid-19 on the country’s soldiers. The report said the soldiers who died were predominantly stationed on or around the Sino-North Korean border.

#23458 Published: March 24, 2020