Anger is mounting among some North Korean soldiers who were encouraged to retire from the military under conditions they would be deployed as workers overseas, but have instead been dispatched to local farms in the countryside, Daily NK has learned.
“The authorities told soldiers last year that they would be discharged and sent to work on bean farms overseas, but they later changed that offer and sent them to domestic farms, claiming that farming potatoes is more important,” a source from Yangkang Province told Daily NK. “Most soldiers left the military with high hopes that they would go to bean farms overseas, but after being relocated to regular farms a lot of them are extremely dissatisfied."
The farm to which that have been relocated, coined the ‘October 18th General Farm,’ is located in Paekam County of Yangkang Province. The authorities have been trying to cajole the former soldiers telling them that Party orders are the "ultimate call to battle" and any place they are carried out is a "battlefield." This has been counterproductive, only fueling these soldiers' anger, according to the source.
“It seems like they're worried about how they've lured in soldiers with lies because bunjo [cooperative farm production unit] leaders, under orders from higher ups, have been building homes for these discharged soldiers to reside in and providing them with a year’s worth of potato rations, kitchen appliances, and blankets," he said, adding that despite this, most of the discharged soldiers are already brainstorming ways to relocate elsewhere.
“Because going overseas is such a rare opportunity, many soldiers even turned down the chance to go back to their homes, completely under the impression that they were headed abroad,” the source said. “But it turned out that the authorities were lying, and the pent-up anger these former soldiers have has prompted domestic disputes as well."
Some wives of these discharged soldiers, from either Pyongyang or other major cities, married the soldiers on the condition that they would go overseas. However, the fact that they were actually sent to the countryside has been dealt a blow to many families. Moreover, exacerbating this situation is the fact that the "October 18th General Farm" is located in an isolated area, requiring people to walk a few kilometers in order to take the train.
“Last autumn, a recently married wife from Pyongyang told her husband to send her back home and demanded a divorce; when that didn't work out, she took an overdose of tuberculosis medicine and committed suicide,” the source said. “She used to be a schoolteacher in Pyongyang, but when she heard that the man she was meeting was going to go overseas, she married him; however, it seems that she was unable to adjust to the country life."
He concluded by saying that this widowed solider now spends his days drinking, lamenting that "if he'd only known he would be sent to the middle of nowhere, he never would have come...and that his wife would still be alive."
[source: dailyNK]
