North Korea’s Ministry of State Security has recently started efforts directed at residents of the country’s China-North Korea border region to blame the domestic spread of COVID-19 on South Korea and North Korean defectors.
According to a Daily NK source in North Hamgyong Province on Friday, rumors are circulating in Hoeryong that the recent spike in suspected COVID-19 cases was due to “enemy supplies” from South Korea contaminated with the coronavirus.
Some North Koreans even claim the South Korean government has encouraged defectors to send balloons across the DMZ carrying items contaminated with COVID-19.
According to the source, Ministry of State Security officials are the source of these rumors. Recently, ministry officials held study meetings for residents of Hoeryong claiming that South Korea and defectors were behind the spread of COVID-19.
In Hoeryong’s Songchon-dong neighborhood, a security guidance officer recently visited local families to conduct study meetings on emergency quarantine efforts. The officer said that the recent spread of the virus was because people who “betrayed the country and ran southward” sent “enemy supplies covered with the coronavirus” into North Korea, the source said.
“As if it weren’t bad enough that they betrayed the country, they also unflinchingly engage in abominable behavior nobody in the world must ever engage in,” the security officer said, according to the source.
The security officer also claimed that behind the “traitors who madly run around engaging in schemes against the DPRK is South Choson’s [South Korea’s] Agency for National Security Planning, which is trying to annihilate our country.”
The Agency for National Security Planning is the old name for South Korea’s spy agency, which was renamed the National Intelligence Service in 1999.
“Because we suffered not even a single case of COVID-19 while the entire world was falling victim to COVID-19, South Choson’s intelligence agency is telling people who ran away and betrayed our country to infiltrate the virus into the DPRK,” the security official explained during the meeting, according to the source.
In this way, security officials appear to be spreading groundless rumors amid the country’s COVID-19 crisis as part of efforts to keep everyone ideologically in line. However, their efforts seem to be having little effect on many North Korean people in the border region.
“Even if Ministry of State Security personnel come to spread malicious propaganda about South Korea, people in the border area already know all there is to know,” the source claimed.
“Locals say that people who went to South Korea have parents and siblings in their hometowns [in North Korea], so it’s nonsense that they would send a malicious virus into our nation,” he explained.
“Agents of the Ministry of State Security have grown rich following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic by taking the money sent by people’s relatives in South Korea,” he continued, adding, “So people just frown at [the officials] who spread rumors saying the outbreak of COVID-19 is because of South Korea and people who went to South Korea.”
Translated by David Black. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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