Last month, the North Korean government relocated a large number of families considered “impure elements” from North Hamgyong Province’s border region to remote rural regions in the province, Daily NK has learned.
As general frustration toward the government has intensified over the prolonged closure of the country’s borders, North Korean authorities appear to be using these kind of forcible relocations to create an atmosphere of fear aimed at supressing “anti-regime behavior.”
A source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on Tuesday that over 40 families were relocated from Hoeryong and the border region of Musan County to remote farms in Kilju County and Orang County in early and mid-May.
They were all families that the government had labelled “impure elements” after their relatives were arrested for the illegal use of foreign mobile phones or sent to concentration camps on charges of espionage.
North Korea has been relocating people living on the border with China since the second half of 2021. The main categories of people subject to relocation are users of illegal foreign mobile phones, people suspected of espionage, the families of defectors, the families of missing people, and people who have complained about party policies.
Daily NK reported in April that North Korean authorities were forcing families with two or more missing relatives to move to rural areas.
Faced with the possibility of being forcible relocated, people in the country’s border region are closely watching what they say and do, the source said.
“The reason that people along the border had been doing better than those in the interior despite the difficult situation in the country is because they’d been getting money from relatives [defectors] in China and South Korea,” said the source. “But the closure of the border and the crackdown on Chinese mobile phones have made things so hard for people [in the border region] that they face conditions little better than those in the interior.
“The families that have [recently] been relocated have relatives who were arrested for using Chinese mobile phones or various other crimes, and the government is sending them far from the border to prevent them from committing new crimes or running away,” he continued, adding, “It’s likely that families of people who are suspected of crimes or who have been arrested by the Ministry of State Security will continue to be forcibly relocated in the future.”
Translated by David Carruth. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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