Workers at the Kilju Pulp and Paper Factory got into a drunken brawl ahead of the Feb. 16 holiday marking the birthday of late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, Daily NK has learned.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on Tuesday that the party committee of the Kilju Pulp and Paper Factory organized “loyalty singing groups” at the workplace to mark the late Kim’s birthday on Pyongyang’s orders. “However, on the evening of Feb. 14, the day before the event, the workers got drunk after singing practice and then got into a fight,” he said, adding that the authorities “made a big issue out of it.”
According to the source, the factory’s party committee ordered the formation of “loyalty singing groups” a month before Kim Jong Il’s birthday, warning that it would judge the loyalty of each workplace based on their performance. Accordingly, the workplaces selected musically inclined workers and began preparations for the “loyalty singing groups” in mid-January.
The day before the main singing group event, the party committee inspected the artistic props that the workers would use in the event at the factory’s cultural hall and made a final review of the preparations, including deciding on the order of the performances.
The committee confirmed that the preparations had gone smoothly and expressed appreciation for the efforts of the workers, who worked as usual during the day and met every evening to practice singing. Then the committee held a dinner for the workers, and this is where things began to go very wrong.
Drunken disaster
“About 30 workers who participated in the loyalty singing groups gathered for dinner and secretly drank among themselves,” the source said. “After some excessive drinking, the workers began to argue, and the argument soon turned into a drunken brawl, complete with fisticuffs.”
The drunken brawlers were so relentlessly agitated that they let bare fists fly. About 10 workers were injured in the brawl. But because the Feb. 15 show had to go on, the battered and bruised workers took the stage that day anyway.
“The factory officials and all the factory workers who saw this were frowning and whispering as they watched the stage,” the source said. “The singers were essentially hospital cases without hospital gowns. You could hear the people in the audience expressing their shock at seeing this truly defeated army singing with long faces.”
The factory’s party committee – believing that even bigger problems would arise if the Kilju county or provincial party committees learned of the affair – summoned the official in charge of the event and the ringleaders of the drunken brawlers to take statements and find out exactly what happened and spent the holiday in less than festive fashion.
Translated by David Black. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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