Pyongyang has ordered the removal of graves from hills near downtown as part of reforestation efforts, but the orders are not being fully complied with. The city is now investigating the ownership of the graves and informing the owners that if they do not remove the graves, the city will do it for them.<\/p>\n
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source in Pyongyang told Daily NK recently that in mid-June the city assigned officials from the Forest Management Bureau and the Legal Affairs Bureau to a task force to investigate grave ownership.<\/p>\n
According to the source, Pyongyang had ordered graves on hills near downtown to be dug up and the bones cremated in accordance with the Central Committee’s order to clear cemeteries and restore the country’s devastated forests. Pyongyang had told grave owners that they could either pay to keep the ashes in urns or scatter them in the forest or water.<\/p>\n
But Pyongyang residents were reluctant to comply, perhaps because of a superstitious belief that the graves of their ancestors should not be disturbed. Eventually, the city set up a task force to check the location of each household’s ancestral tomb and investigate why some households had not removed graves on hills near the city center.<\/p>\n
Task force members surveyed the hills to identify the remaining graves and then visited each of the affected households to inform them that the authorities would take matters into their own hands if they failed to comply with the removal order.<\/p>\n
“The task force is warning that given the difficulty of digging up graves in winter when the ground is frozen, any households that fail to remove their graves by this Chusok [the Autumn Harvest Festival] will be considered unwilling to comply and the city will burn [the bones] and dispose of them in the forests or waterways.<\/p>\n
“The task force is telling people that Pyongyang intends to bulldoze any unexcavated graves and turn them into forests or empty lots, informing the Central Committee that it is leading the way in carrying out orders in a manner befitting the national capital.”<\/p>\n
The task force intends to notify all grave owners of these matters by the end of July.<\/p>\n
In a related incident, a resident of Pyongyang’s Samsok district in his sixties drunkenly complained to the head of his neighborhood watch unit about the grave removal program after the verification and notification process began. The man’s complaint was reported to police in late June and he was taken into custody at the district office, the source said.<\/p>\n