North Korea’s Party-publication, Rodong
Sinmun, recently published an article praising a couple who have been living
in the mountains raising scores of orphans for 20 years, prompting many residents to comment on the deep-rooted issues the article unwittingly highlights.
Under the title, “Small Mountain Home in
Dooilryung Sings of Love and Compassion for the Land,” the article stated, “Unable to have children of their own, a couple in the mountains receives
thanks from Kim Jong Eun for raising 55 orphans.”
The piece went on to praise the couple’s “accomplishment of raising that many children during a time when raising one’s
own children was hard enough” all in the name of the “Motherland,” adding that a television and other electronics were
bestowed on them as thanks for their tireless efforts.
 Image: Rodong Sinmun |
However, residents who heard this
exaggerated narrative condemned it as nothing but Party propaganda. “It’s a lie
rigged to bolster this year’s New Year’s Address that claims the Party will
share its fate with its people as a mother would,” a source from North Pyongan Province told Daily NK by phone on January 23rd. “Now these
55 orphans will not be able to leave the boundaries of that place and will be
forced to farm and raise their own food, living as nothing but laborers.”
Children born into families too poor to
sustain life in North Korea frequently run away from home and congregate near
active markets to beg for food. Referred to as kkotjebi, these destitute
children are products of abandonment by parents lacking the economic means to
care for them, broken homes, or a combination of the two.
According to the source, Sinuiju City,
North Pyongan Province, the center of trade between North Korea and China, is
an area replete with kkotjebi. To crackdown on the issue, Kim Jong Eun recently
ordered all regional inminban [people’s unit] to form a 9.27 task forces,
separate the kkotjebi in their respective quarters, and send them to designated
orphanages, or in some cases, back to their parents.
The 9.27 task force asserts to provide
temporary residence to the homeless, but the comprehensive 9.27 operation’s
origins are more ominous, some of which are still apparent in the recent
initiative. The 9.27 Committee, an ad hoc control mechanism initiated by the
authorities in the 1990s, during the apex of the North Korean famine, was
charged with the task of removing corpses on the streets during the night so that
people would not perceive the magnitude of the mass starvation.
The source added that the scant funds
orphanages receive from the state are often siphoned off by employees to employ
as bribes for officials. As previously reported by Daily NK, the state
often provides incentives for residents to take in these children, in this case providing farmland and gifts to encourage residents
to raise them; needless to say, the exploitation of hapless children this system encourages is given no regard.
“Since the parents and officials involved in raising these 55 children received the ‘personal’ thanks of Kim Jong Eun, those
children have been stripped of the future, living only to do road maintenance
and other arduous labor” the source said, explaining that they will serve only as loyalty-fostering “bait for Party cadres to advance their positions.”
