With construction for the ‘Mt. Baekdu
Songun Youth Power Plant’ fully underway, desperate attempts to satiate their
unrelenting hunger have seen mobilized soldiers and shock troops looting collective and personal barley fields in the area
despite the fact that the crop has not yet reached full harvest.
“The shock troops and soldiers who are
mobilized for construction efforts related to the power plant do not have enough to eat.
Unlike other residents, who are free to engage in business like selling at the jangmadang [markets], the soldiers have
no way of making ends meet. The provisions and food that they receive from the
government are quite meager,” a source in Yanggang Province reported to Daily
NK on August 2nd. Two additional sources in the same province verified this
news.
This grim reality, she added, drives many
to steal crops from the residents, many of whom struggle to get by themselves. In fact, the situation is so severe that the
majority of the barley fields within a 6km radius of the power plant have been
picked clean with nothing left to harvest.
In the past, the shock troops alone made a significant dent in the crop yield, but the additional soldiers this year have further compounded an already dire situation, she said, noting, “Residents
guard their fields around the clock, the unrelenting worry preventing them from
sleeping through the night.”
The barley crop planted in the earlier
period is typically harvested around August 5th; the later round collected closer to the 15th. Hungry, overworked shock troops and soldiers are too weak to
wait for the crop to mature, plucking barley that is far from ripe. The damage wrought by this desperation is such that “the fields are pillaged late at night, and
end up looking as though they’ve have bombs dropped on them,” the source
asserted.
“The citizens of Cheonsu-ri collective farm
work units 3 and 5 and residents in Hwangto-ri have all but given up on farming
efforts since the construction of the power plant broke ground in 2001. Some in
the area are trying to sell goods to the shock troops but many are just moving
to Deoklip District and Yoopyeong District,” the source explained.
“Residents in Ori and Shibri —
villages in proximity of the power plant — have moved to farm in Jeungsan,
about 11.8 km away,” she said, adding that in Cheonsu-ri where
the power plants is, few inhabited homes remain and the adjacent fields
abandoned and now teeming with wormwood stalks.
Meanwhile, the authorities have failed to
ameliorate the underlying cause of these issues. Some residents left behind
have attempted to set makeshift traps in the fields but such efforts have met
with little success.
Moreover, compounding an already difficult
situation are grave concerns that if barley, the crop typically planted to tide
residents over until the potato harvest, is disappearing at this rate, potato
looting may be prove even worse. To attempt to get a leg up and stave off
disaster, worried residents are already patrolling the potato fields, according
to the source.
She said that those left in Cheonsu-ri are close to the end of their rope, lamenting,“Will spring even come to stolen fields?” This phrase is from a poem of the same title by Lee Sang Hwa [1901-1943] from the period of Japan’s annexation of Korea. In Lee’s work, “stolen fields” refers to the loss of national sovereignty, while spring alludes to independence.
For the residents appropriating the work to illustrate their current situation, “the excerpt provides an apt parallel for their grievances regarding the apathy and lack of accountability from the current leadership,” she concluded.
*The content of this article was broadcast to the North Korean people via Unification Media Group.
