Month: June 2022

North Korea is sending most of its reserve medicines to the capital Pyongyang, leaving rural citizens in the lurch, with many turning to alternatives and counterfeits, as the country copes with waves of COVID-19 cases. After two years of denying the pandemic had penetrated its closed borders, North Korea in May declared a “maximum emergency” and acknowledged the virus had begun to spread among participants of a large-scale military parade the previous month. Medicine to treat the disease is in short supply and the stocks that are available are getting sent to Pyongyang, home of the country’s wealthiest and most privileged citizens. The drug shortage has left an opening for a black market of unproven traditional medicine to emerge, with some citizens offering dried deer blood as a COVID remedy. Counterfeit versions of fever reducers like aspirin and acetaminophen are also on the rise, sources said. “All pharmacies are open 24 hours a day in this maximum emergency, but there is a huge difference between Pyongyang and the provincial areas, so people out here are really dissatisfied,” a resident of the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “Expectations were high as the central quarantine command had intensive discussions where they agreed to quickly distribute the reserve stocks of medicines for the emergency, but we were greatly disappointed when that medicine was given to people in Pyongyang and to the military,” he said. In the city of Sinuiju, which lies across the Yalu River border from China, no one can find even basic medicines like fever reducers and painkillers, the source said. “Reserve medicines were supplied in very small amounts to hospitals, and pharmacy shelves are empty,” he said. “At least some pharmacies in Sinuiju are stocked with herbal medicines used as a cold medicine, but county-level pharmacies are completely empty. However, the pharmacies are ordered to be open 24 hours a day unconditionally,” he said, adding that salespeople and security guards are sitting around at the pharmacies day and night, even if they have nothing to sell. In the city of Chongjin in northeastern province of North Hamgyong, patients complaining of a high fever and cough have increased, a resident there told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely. North Korea lacks adequate testing capabilities to confirm coronavirus cases but has been tracking numbers of patients reporting “fever.” “An acquaintance who is a doctor at a provincial hospital told me that even when patients with coronavirus symptoms come to the hospital, they are unable to receive the proper treatment because there is no medicine,” said the second source. “According to my acquaintance, medicines are normally supplied to hospitals and pharmacies in Pyongyang, and patients with fever in Pyongyang are receiving intensive treatment at quarantine facilities. But even though pharmacies in Chongjin are open 24 hours a day, but there is no medicine or only herbal medicines whose efficacy has not been verified. So it is not helpful to patients at all,” he said.  “They complain saying, ‘Are Pyongyangers the only citizens of the state? Is it okay for us in the provinces to just die?’” the source said.  To deal with the shortage of medicine in the provinces, people are turning to the black market, where unproven traditional remedies like deer blood are sold. In Pyongysong, South Pyongan province, north of Pyongyang, people are illegally selling deer blood from their homes, touting its medicinal properties as effective against COVID-19, a resident there told RFA on condition of anonymity for safety reasons. “The types of deer blood traded on the black market are raw blood and dried blood powder. Raw blood in a tiny penicillin bottle is 10,000 won [about US$1.80], and powdered blood in a penicillin bottle is 5,000 won [about US$0.90],” she said. “If you catch a deer, you can drain its blood. Then you put the blood in a plastic bag,” she said. “Raw blood spoils, so it’s hard to sell. So, people dry the blood and sell it. When a deer gives birth, there is placenta coming out. They also dry it and sell it as a treatment for coronavirus.” The deer blood remedy is available in North Pyongan as well, a resident there, who declined to be named for safety reasons, told RFA. She said that rather than catching the deer in the wild, the workers on a deer farm that supplies meat and other byproducts for Kim Jong Un, his family, and other high-ranking officials, are illicitly selling the blood on the black market. “The musk or placenta of deer are vacuum packed and usually sent to the Central Committee, but the people who work there are secretly selling it.” Counterfeit medicines that look like the real thing but have no effect at all are also being sold. Fakes have made their way to the local marketplaces in Chongjin, a source there told RFA on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “The authorities are making a fuss saying they are responding to coronavirus by releasing the national reserve medicines, but there’s still a shortage here so counterfeiters are taking advantage of this opportunity,” the second Chongjin source told RFA. “A few days ago, the head of the neighborhood watch unit circulated a notice from the district to each household. The notice warns of the fake drugs out in circulation. There are many people around me who bought fake medicines and suffered from taking them,” the second Chongjin source said. “There are various types of counterfeit medicines, such as antipyretic analgesics such as aspirin and acetaminophen [Tylenol], and multivitamins, which are frequently sought by people to treat coronavirus infection. A friend from my workplace had a fever, so he bought acetaminophen at the market and took it for two days. But it was fake and didn’t work at all,” the second Chongjin source said. The counterfeit was indistinguishable from the real deal, according to the second Chongjin resident. “I saw the fake medicine that my friend…

Uyghur rights groups are calling for the United Nations human rights chief to resign after they said she reiterated Chinese talking points in a news conference about her trip to northwestern China’s Xinjiang region and failed to denounce the repression Uyghurs face there as a genocide. Michelle Bachelet, a former Chilean president who has served as the U.N. high commissioner for human rights since 2018, paid a six-day visit to China last week, including spots in the coastal city of Guangzhou and Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi) and Kashgar (Kashi) in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). At a May 28 press conference in Beijing to mark the end of the visit, Bachelet said she had “raised questions and concerns about the application of counter-terrorism and de-radicalization measures and their broad application” and their impact on the rights of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in the XUAR.  Bachelet, who said before her trip that she wouldn’t be conducting an investigation like Uyghur rights groups had pushed for, told reporters that she had been unable to assess the full scale of what China calls “vocational education and training centers” (VETC) in Xinjiang, but which the human rights community and scholars call internment camps.  Uyghur rights groups took issue with her references to “deradicalization,” “anti-terrorism” and “vocational education and training centers,” which they said mimic the words Beijing uses to describe its campaign in Xinjiang. Washington, D.C.-based Campaign for Uyghurs said Bachelet provided no transparency about the trip and that a prison visit in Xinjiang was a “Potemkin-style sham.” “The high commissioner has disgraced herself and her office by refusing to investigate China’s genocide and adopting, repeating the Chinese regime’s narrative, further cementing their propaganda in the U.N.,” Rushan Abbas, the organization’s executive director, told RFA on Tuesday. “Her comments seem custom-made for Beijing’s propaganda machine, and she neglects the duties of her office and the founding principle of the U.N.,” she said. Abbas called on Bachelet to step down from her post. ‘In bed with communist China’ Bachelet she said she raised with the government the lack of independent judicial oversight in the region, the reliance on 15 indicators to determine tendencies towards violent extremism, allegations of the use of force at the institutions, and reports of severe restrictions on religious practices. “During my visit, the government assured me that the VETC system has been dismantled,” she said. “I encouraged the government to undertake a review of all counter terrorism and deradicalization policies to ensure they fully comply with international human rights standards, and in particular that they are not applied in an arbitrary and discriminatory way.” In 2017, authorities began illegally detaining thousands of Uyghurs and others in “re-education” camps in an effort, they said, to prevent religious extremism and radicalism, later calling the facilities “closed training centers” or “vocational training centers.” But evidence quickly emerged that inmates had been deprived of their freedom under the pretense of political education and were in some case subjected to severe abuse. It is believed that authorities have held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and others accused of harboring “strong religious” and “politically incorrect” views in a vast network of “re-education” or internment camps in Xinjiang. The United States and the legislatures of several Western countries have deemed China’s mistreatment of the mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in the XUAR as genocide and crimes against humanity. Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress based in Germany, said Bachelet missed a historic opportunity to hold China accountable for the Uyghur genocide. “The impression is that now the U.N. is in bed with communist China, a regime that has been committing the Uyghur genocide for the past five years,” he said Tuesday. “It is truly stunning to see that Ms. Bachelet did not act as the highest human rights official at the U.N. but rather as a mouthpiece of the Chinese communist government during and after her trip. “She has completely discredited the role of her office and the authority of the United Nations as a champion of human rights in the world,” Isa said.   Isa also called for Bachelet’s immediate resignation. US expresses concern The same day Bachelet held a press conference about her trip, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. remained concerned about her visit and efforts by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to restrict and manipulate it. “While we continue to raise our concerns about China’s human rights abuses directly with Beijing and support others who do so, we are concerned the conditions Beijing authorities imposed on the visit did not enable a complete and independent assessment of the human rights environment in the PRC, including in Xinjiang, where genocide and crimes against humanity are ongoing,” Blinken said in a statement. The U.S. was also troubled by reports that authorities had warned Uyghurs and others in the XUAR not to complain or speak openly about conditions in the region, that no insight was provided into the whereabouts of missing Uyghurs and the conditions of those in detention, he said. “The high commissioner should have been allowed confidential meetings with family members of Uyghur and other ethnic minority diaspora communities in Xinjiang who are not in detention facilities but are forbidden from traveling out of the region,” Blinken said.    In response to Blinken’s statement, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a press conference on Monday that the U.S. rehashed false claims that had been debunked countless times to try to smear and attack China. “Ridiculously, this time they made up new lies that China has restricted and manipulated the visit,” he said. “In fact, all the activities and arrangements of High Commissioner Bachelet during her stay in China were decided in accordance with her will and based on full consultation of the two sides.” “The high commissioner also said at the press conference that she had unsupervised and extensive meetings during the visit,” Zhao said. “Where is restriction and manipulation to speak of? To find the one…