The lives of North Korea’s 'strongest soldier?s?'

“We have the greatest general and the strongest army! That’s why we will defeat the enemy!” This is what I heard every day when I was a soldier in the North Korean military. I saw and experienced hunger, tragic accidents and corrupt officers everywhere.

In 2001, I entered the North Korean army after graduating from college. At that time, I thought I would be a hero due to the regime’s propaganda. However, my company's soldiers seemed like they homeless people. Their clothing was old and tattered. The company barracks were like an ancient hut from a history documentary.

According to the regime’s propaganda, we were the “strongest soldiers,” but we always went hungry. The regime says it is “military-first,” but the “strongest soldiers” looked more like beggars.

After a few years, I was malnourished. In 2004, I was about 5 foot 9 inches tall, but only weighed about 40 kilograms. We were sent food, but my company commander kept it and sold it to make money for himself. He even bought a fancy new motorcycle, which back then was like buying a Lamborghini.

Not surprisingly, around 60 percent of my company’s soldiers were malnourished and seriously starving. Around 30 percent went missing. That’s why stealing food and money from civilians was common.

The North Korean Army’s official name is the Korean People’s Army, but people call them the “Korean People’s enemy.” Soldiers would steal nearly everything from civilians. For example, in the autumn, my company's soldiers and I would take corn and rice from cooperative and private farms. We also stole livestock like pigs and goats that belonged to civilians and even took their clothing to exchange for food.

One of the North Korean Worker Party’s slogans is, “The cooperative farm is my farm." That means you should take care of crops as diligently and seriously as your own. But North Korean soldiers twist it to “the cooperative farm is our farm.” Which means "we can take it over anytime." This is the reality of the North Korean Army’s so-called “strongest soldiers.”

Another thing that happened to “the strongest soldiers” was the frequency of tragic accidents. In 2008, my fellow soldiers and I received orders to dismantle three huge concrete bridges to collect iron rebar due to the building material shortage. We dismantled them using sledgehammers. Then, a tragic accident happened, trapping approximately 20 soldiers under a huge concrete beam. The crane was malfunctioning, so those pitiful soldiers were trapped under a heavy beam for over an hour. There were no ambulances or 911 to call so we blocked the highway to stop every vehicle so we could take the injured soldiers to the hospital.

Several weeks later, I heard that three of them had died, some of them had lost legs, and others had serious injuries. There was no compensation from the regime, of course. They are only interested in protecting the Kim family, not supporting the people and soldiers of North Korea.

The regime states that “we have the greatest supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, and powerful nuclear weapons” but they don’t talk about the many soldiers that die because of malnutrition, tragic accidents, or who are killed by fellow soldiers who may have suffered from mental illness.

Human rights are not complicated. Just simply, when you are hungry, you have the right to eat. When you get sick, you have the right to seek medical care. When you get in an accident, you have the right to learn what happened and resolve the situation fairly. But those things were not relevant to North Korean people and soldiers. The North Korean human rights situation is much more vulnerable than you can imagine.

The North Korean regime focuses on nuclear weapons and missiles. They are only interested in how to keep the Kim family from collapsing instead of protecting the people and soldiers of North Korea. Even for a simple negative comment about the Kim regime, a person can get sent to a political prison camp. There are many political prison camps in North Korea and hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in them who never have an opportunity to receive legal judgment and never get a chance to come out alive. This savage behavior is unforgivable, even if dictator Kim Jong-un was ever punished by the International Criminal Court.

The main reason I want to share my story is to increase awareness of the real situations North Korean soldiers face instead of how they are shown in the media like robotic soldiers marching in emotionless unison.

Finally, when you see photos in the media showing fancy buildings or bridges in Pyongyang, please think about how many of those “strongest soldiers” died as they built them.

Eom Yeong-nam, a North Korean Refugee Keynote Speaker with Freedom Speakers International (FSI), is the author of the forthcoming book “The Strongest Soldier of North Korea.” This article is based on his testimony at the 2023 European Forum on North Korean Human Rights hosted by the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea on Oct. 24.