Recently, a family in Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province, starved to death while another family chose to commit suicide as they, too, were facing starvation.
A source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on Wednesday that two families died one after the other on Mar. 6 and Mar. 7 in Hoeryong.
Although Hoeryong is located in a mountainous area, because it is so close to the Chinese border, people living there have long been able to engage in trade and smuggling. This is why the city was not affected as badly as other areas during the famine of the 1990s.
However, the closure of the border over the past two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic has forced Hoeryong residents into extreme difficulties since they can no longer earn money or receive goods across the border.
As a result of the dire circumstances the residents of the city are facing, one family starved to death earlier this month while another, also facing starvation, decided to collectively commit suicide by burning charcoal (when burned in a closed space, charcoal can cause death as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning).
The incidents were immediately reported to Hoeryong’s party committee.
Before reporting the situation to the provincial party committee, however, the municipal party committee convened an enlarged meeting on Mar. 8 with the main officials from Hoeryong’s party committee, people’s committee, Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Social Security, and Public Prosecutor’s Office to better understand the current living conditions of local residents.
“The municipal party committee had told officials at district offices, organizations, and companies to be on the lookout for people not attending work or school due to starvation and to write up daily reports on such cases,” the source said, adding that the municipal party committee had summoned all these officials who, according to the committee, failed to do their job properly in preventing the deaths.
During the meeting, the municipal party committee said that it already warned local officials about upcoming food shortages in the spring and emphasized the need for preparations to be made beforehand. It blamed local officials for these terrible incidents, saying they neglected their duties, the source added.
The municipal party committee blamed the deaths of the two families on “irresponsible officials,” saying that they chose to focus on “ideological issues” while ignoring the people, even while they knew that people “could not go outside because they had nothing to eat.”
Moreover, they also raised the question to the officials of why it is that ordinary people are the only ones starving while there are no such food shortage problems among the households of cadres.
The municipal party committee also emphasized that officials are fostering a “betrayal of socialism” among people who “can be saved by the party” when people die of malnutrition or commit suicide due to food shortages, adding that officials should “never neglect” such cases.
After this, discussions were held during the meeting on how to make sure that there are no more starving households while also emphasizing the need for urgent measures to be taken to deal with the situation. However, no active measures to deal with the problem were drawn up, according to the source.
“Officials say that more than 30% of the people are facing extremely dire circumstances, so there’s a need for active measures to counter this problem, but [the authorities] are only questioning the head of the inminban [people’s unit] or us [local officials] while just handing out a few kilos of rice [comparable to] chicken feed to the people,” the source said.
Translated by Gabriela Bernal
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