North Korean soldiers assigned to regional factory projects in North Pyongan province are frequently deserting their units due to unbearable working conditions, including malnutrition, injuries, and extreme pressure to maintain the pace of construction.
According to a source in the province recently, the construction of regional factories is a project that Kim Jong Un personally announced and is closely supervising, so soldiers assigned to the project are given backbreaking work to keep the project on schedule. The soldiers are often injured while working, but are forced to continue working without proper treatment. As a result, many soldiers contract infections that eventually require hospitalization.
Despite the intense physical demands of the construction work, the soldiers are not given enough to eat, which often leads to malnutrition. When officers complain about the treatment of soldiers, it is not surprising that the rank and file often desert their posts.
“When an engineering unit assigned to build a regional factory in North Pyongan province asked arrested soldiers on Oct. 17 why they had deserted, most of the deserters said they were driven by feelings of desperation,” the source said.
The source quoted an arrested 19-year-old deserter as saying: “Kim Jong Un wants the regional factory construction project to last ten years, which means I’ll just be doing construction year after year until I’m discharged from the army. For one thing, I’m so hungry, and for another, the intensity of the work is just terrible. I ran away so I’d get a dishonorable discharge. Could you please do that for me?”
When the interrogating officer asked the young soldier if he realized that a dishonorable discharge would ruin his career prospects as a civilian, the soldier said it did not matter and asked again for a dishonorable discharge.
But the unit’s commanders concluded that if they gave the young soldier a dishonorable discharge as requested, other deserters would make similar requests and end up deserting the army as well. Instead, the unit command decided that the right approach was to re-educate and retrain the soldier by giving him the toughest work assignment possible.
The unit also intends to tighten controls and security to prevent further desertions. As part of these efforts, the unit will assign teams of military policemen to stand guard at all times.
“This unit’s temporary measures are preventing desertions, but the problem of soldiers deserting because of hunger, illness, fatigue and poor working conditions can’t be solved so easily,” the source said.
The 20×10 regional development policy was first proposed by Kim Jong Un in a policy speech in January. The policy’s main goal is to raise the living standards of North Koreans over the next decade by building modern factories in 20 counties each year.
The city of Kusong and Kujang and Unsan counties in North Pyongan province were selected as the sites for regional factory construction this year.
Daily NK works with a network of sources in North Korea, China, and elsewhere. For security reasons, their identities remain anonymous.
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