A man in North Korea’s Musan county died from a police beating after collecting fallen corn from a recently harvested field, sparking local outrage.
A source in North Hamgyong province told The Daily NK on Tuesday that the incident occurred around 8 p.m. on Sept. 15.
The man, who was in his 40s, was a worker at the Musan mine. Despite having five mouths to feed, he did not receive regular rations from his workplace, and his wife did not earn enough from selling vegetables to support the family. Whenever the man had a day off, he would go up into the hills to collect firewood to sell for a little extra income.
Since all the nearby hills were bare of trees, the man collected firewood on a hill some distance from his home. On his way back down the hill, he passed a harvested cornfield when he saw some ears of corn on the ground. He put down his bundle of sticks and began to pick up the corn.
Soon the man was spotted by a group of policemen who ordered him to come out of the cornfield. When he ignored them and continued to pick corn, one of them beat him to death.
Musan county’s party committee had ordered the police stations around the farms to send out squads to patrol the area. The goal was to ensure that the crops harvested earlier in the month were properly stored and managed, and that no grain was wasted.
The police organized squads of two or three burly men to patrol farms, warehouses, and threshing grounds around the clock.
On the day of the incident, the policemen patrolling the cornfields saw the bundle of sticks the man had left on the road. Thinking there might be bandits nearby, the policemen apparently shouted several times for the man to come out of the cornfield instead of rushing in.
The man looked at the police patrol, but did not stop wandering through the cornfield looking for fallen ears.
This angered one of the policemen, an ex-soldier, who charged the man and punched him viciously. The man was knocked to the ground without a chance to resist and soon died, the source said.
Gleaning ban fuels public frustration
Because the incident took place before dark, there were several witnesses to the beating, and word spread quickly through the community that a man had been beaten to death for picking up ears of corn.
“Picking ears of corn used to be no big deal. In fact, it was common to see groups of people going into cornfields after the harvest to pick up ears that the harvesters had missed. But today, even entering fields after harvest is considered trespassing and punishable by a sentence of forced labor, and picking up fallen ears is treated as seriously as stealing from the state granary,” the source said.
The ex-soldier who beat the man to death for taking the corn is currently being questioned by Musan county police, the source added.
The Daily NK works with a network of sources in North Korea, China, and elsewhere. For security reasons, their identities remain anonymous.
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