Earlier this month, North Korea’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) told border patrol units to “deepen the bottom of the Tumen River so that people would not be able to enter it and therefore be unable to defect,” a source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
The source said that the authorities are trying to make the river deeper to ensure that people become too afraid to defect across it.
In the order, the MSS stated that the only way to prevent people from defecting across the river is to deepen it. The order instructed border guards to only dig on the North Korean side, not the middle of the river or near the Chinese side, and that they must dig deeper than human height.
The MSS order also stated that “protecting the border is more difficult than going to war,” and that “we are protecting the border with all our might, by building barriers and setting up electrical fences, but there are still traitors who try to defect from our country. We must use all means at our disposal to stop them.”
The MSS further emphasized that digging the river deep is a worthwhile project because “the sand and gravel dug up from the riverbed can be used as subsidiary materials for border barrier construction projects.”
Many soldiers are just pretending to work
Border guards and the military’s engineering corps responsible for construction projects along the border are working together to dig up the riverbed in sections that the MSS ordered them to finish by the end of the month.
However, since the soldiers have to work in the summer heat without any machinery, and against the river’s current, most of them are only pretending to work, the source claimed.
Some border guards are even criticizing the ministry’s orders, saying that “water naturally flows downstream, so any hole we dig in the riverbed will immediately fill up again with sand and gravel. This order makes absolutely no sense.”
Even high-ranking military officials are agreeing with the soldiers in this matter. They are telling soldiers that they will at least need to pretend to work because the MSS directly ordered the project, but that they can always “pass the time by having water fights.” The soldiers have also been told that if the higher-ups visit and ask for a status report on the excavation project, “report that we did follow orders, but sand and gravel flowed right back [into the areas we dug out].”
The MSS also ordered the construction of an additional guard post every 300 meters in the no man’s land along the border where the river is narrow and easy to cross, the source told Daily NK.
Translated by Annie Eun Jung Kim. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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