Defectors recall North Korea productivity 'battles'

Before fleeing North Korea in 2009, Kang Mi-Jin was mobilized for many "battles," productivity campaigns that provided her with a proud moment of making a speech pledging loyalty to the Kim family, left her suffering a big scalp laceration during a tunneling construction accident and put her at various other works. Now living in South Korea and watching news that North Korea recently launched a "80-day battle," Kang doesn't have any traumatic memory of her past campaigns but says she's realized that she and others should have been paid for their hard labor.

"When they pushed us to work that hard, I wonder if they should have at least given some wages to us," Kang, 52, said. "North Korean people have gotten used to such (free labor) for so long. They know they have nothing to gain by raising an issue with that."

North Korea occasionally stages all-out national campaigns called "battles" meant to more firmly unite citizens around the Kim dynasty, press them to work harder and report bigger production ahead of major political events. The ongoing campaign is aimed at greeting a ruling party congress set for January, the first of its kind in four years, with "fiery enthusiasm and brilliant achievements," according to the North's main Rodong Simmun newspaper.

Some foreign experts doubt short-term campaigns can address the fundamental systemic economic problems facing the impoverished country. But North Korean leaders would still need these campaigns to cement their grips on power in times of economic troubles or tensions with the outside world.

Under the ongoing "80-day battle," North Koreans are required to work extra hours to fulfill or exceed newly-set quotas in all areas ranging from the farming industry and coal mines to typhoon rehabilitation efforts and anti-coronavirus campaigns.Kang, a former construction agency official, said she was sent to a mountain in southern North Korea to excavate a tunnel for a highway construction during two consecutive "200-day battles" in the late 1980s.

Then, a young team leader considered as having "a fine voice,"  Kang was picked to deliver a speech before about 3,000 co-workers in January 1989 to pledge allegiance to North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, the late grandfather of Kim Jong Un, and declare vows to meet quotas established in line with the first of the two "200-day battles."

Kang said she sometimes worked for about 12 hours a day and used a rock drill that was as heavy as she was. She said her menstruation stopped and that a rock accidentally popped from a crusher hit her head and let her shed blood that soaked one bath towel entirely. Kang said one of her co-workers lost his left hand during an accidental explosion.

Kang said most North Koreans at the time were still willing to accept extra work during "battles" as the state rationing system functioned well until then. After a famine in the mid-1990s killed an estimated hundreds of thousands, however, many people failed to show up at "battles," she said.

During a "100-day battle" in 2005 when Kang worked as head of a lower-level association of ordinary women in the northern town of Paekam, she said some women bribed her with shoes, clothes and meat to pass works like building an outdoor swimming pool and a stone embankment.

The current "80-day battle" is the 13th of its kind since North Korea's foundation in 1948, and the third since Kim Jong Un took power in late 2011. There were two other "battles" in 2009, and Kim likely orchestrated them as an heir apparent to his ailing father Kim Jong Il, who suffered a stroke in that year, some experts say.

North Korea performs so many other regional-level, smaller-scale productivity and speed campaigns. Many of them are also called "battles." For example, there are "rice planting battles," "fertilizer battles," "weed-scraping battles" and "kimchi-making battles."

"I can't count how many times I was mobilized for 'battles.' We did 'battles' every day," aid Heo Young Chul, a North Korean defector, 57, who came to South Korea in 2002. "I think I was mobilized hundreds of times, not dozens of times."When he worked for a food processing company in Hyesan, a city near the border with China, in the first half of the 1990s, Heo said he and his co-workers were mobilized for works to construct a hydropower plant and residences of retired soldiers.

Among the toughest works he endured were climbing mountains to log trees with hand saws and axes, moving them to construction sites and digging the frozen grounds with shovels and pickax.He said he once passed out when his head was hit by a falling tree.

He sometimes felt frustrated at repeated mobilizations but avoided publicly complaining about that in fears of the consequences it could trigger."In North Korea, complaining about the government could end up with your family being sent to a political prison camp," he said.

(Image Credit: AP) 

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