A growing number of North Korean youths who were forced by the North’s authorities to “volunteer” for hardship jobs are abandoning their workplaces and visiting gambling halls, Daily NK has learned.
“A considerable number of youths who volunteered for socialist work at mines, farms and construction sites are running away because of dissatisfaction with their assignments. The police and youth league supervisors are rounding up the runaways, and lately they’ve mostly been found gambling their money in gambling halls,” a source in North Pyongan Province told Daily NK on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
North Korean state media, including Rodong Sinmun, continue to report on young people volunteering for hard labor. Earlier this year, the North Korean regime boasted that in the month of January alone, some 6,000 young people across the country had signed up for major socialist construction sites to achieve the goals set at an expanded meeting of the Central Committee’s plenary session and political bureau.
But in reality, the source said, most of these young people are pressured by various organizations, including the party and the Socialist Patriotic Youth League, to go to hard labor positions regardless of their actual desires. As a result, the young people who are forced into these hard jobs against their will often run away because they do not want to waste their lives in such jobs.
The North Korean authorities, with the help of the youth league’s observers and the police, have been tracking down the runaways. It turns out that more and more young runaways are being found betting on pool games or participating in illegal gambling rings in private homes.
“In Tongrim County, North Pyongan Province, a discharged soldier who ran away from his farm assignment was caught last month at a gambling hall and sent back to the farm,” the source said.
According to the source, this young man had been medically discharged earlier this year, but the county branch of the youth league had placed him on the list of volunteers for farm work without considering his physical ailment. He made several impassioned appeals to the league to be removed from the list on medical grounds, but his appeals were ultimately denied.
The young man was unable to endure life on his farm assignment and finally ran away last May. He then moved from one gambling den to another until late June, when he was caught in a gambling den and returned to the farm.
“The only thing I want to do is gamble”
A similar incident took place in Kaechon, a city in South Pyongan Province. A young man who volunteered to work in a coal mine last year as part of a city-organized initiative was caught visiting various gambling establishments instead of actually working in the mine.
“This young man had been dishonorably discharged from the army for stealing materials needed to run his unit. An inveterate troublemaker, he was sent to the coal mine as one of 70 people on a list of volunteers, but he was unhappy with what he considered an unfair assignment. He kept skipping work and eventually fell into gambling,” said a source in South Pyongan Province.
“The only thing I want to do is gamble,” the young man reportedly told his parents. “I can relax in a gambling hall because there are many people in the same boat as me, people I can relate to.”
The source told Daily NK that “young people who are forced into hardship positions by their organizations or by society itself are very frustrated at not being able to do the things they want to do. The number of people who turn to gambling as a means of escapism is rising sharply.”
Daily NK works with a network of sources living in North Korea, China, and elsewhere. Their identities remain anonymous for security reasons.
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