North Korean Military Service Loses Its Luster

In Hoeryong, a group of North Korean children has been sentenced to a life of laboring on collective farms for refusing to join the army:

As a result of a first-of-its-kind refusal to sign an army enrollment petition, students soon to graduate from a middle school in Hoiryeong, North Hamkyung Province have been ordered by the Party to work on collective farms for life.

Furthermore, during this process the parents of some of the students protested after the children of government officials in Hoiryeong were granted exemptions from the same order.

The incident occurred at the Osanduk Middle School in early February. The Army Mobilization Department had urged graduating middle school students to sign the “People’s Army (KPA) Enrollment Petition,” stressing that “America and South Chosun puppets are taking provocative wartime measures. [Daily NK]

Military service used to be desirable and genuinely voluntary in North Korea. Until recently, it was seen as a meal ticket and a route to higher social status. Apparently, those days have even passed in a bleak backwater like Hoeryong.