Food shortages in North Korea became so bad in mid-May that Pyongyang told its citizens to prepare for a "second difficult march," in an allusion to the famine of the 1990s, an official from the reclusive country revealed Thursday.
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A North Korean propaganda squad sings to farmers busy planting rice at the Jeong-baek cooperative farm in Pyongyang on Tuesday. North Korea faces a grave food shortage and Pyongyang has warned citizens to prepare for a "second difficult march."
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The official said the order was disseminated in lectures to citizens by North Korean authorities. He said North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in late May visited a cooperative farm in Hwanghae Province, where he rebuked farmers for not planting on time and ordered "everyone who eats rice" to head to the farms. As a result, soldiers and other citizens have now been mobilized to help out in rural areas, with armband-wearing police officers going around towns and cities hauling off to the farms anyone who appears to have nothing to do. Those taken to the farms are freed only after they secure a certificate that records how much work they have done.
The term "difficult march" was coined by the late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung to refer to a 100-day period in the late 1930s when he and his anti-Japanese partisans experienced extreme hardship fleeing from the Imperial Japanese Army. North Korea¡¯s famine in the mid and late 1990s was likened to Kim Il-sung's travails and also called the "difficult march."
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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