A wave of break-ins is sweeping rural areas of South Hamgyong province in April as thieves exploit the spring planting season to target homes left empty during the day, stealing food, solar panels, fertilizer, and cooking pots from households already struggling to get by.
A source in South Hamgyong province told Daily NK on Monday that a string of burglaries had occurred in Kowon county and Yonggwang county, with local people heading to the fields to prepare for corn planting leaving their homes unattended for most of the day. “The losses local people are suffering are beyond description,” the source said.
Corn planting in the area is set to begin from late April through early May, meaning virtually all working-age people are out in the fields during daylight hours. The sustained absence from homes has given thieves a reliable window to operate, and the number of affected households has been growing steadily.
Rural households in the area are almost universally dealing with food shortages, with most people borrowing food or money at high interest rates just to keep their families fed. Against that backdrop, thieves have been breaking padlocks and making off with whatever has value: stored food, solar panels, batteries, imported fertilizer, seeds, and aluminum cooking pots. Some households have been left with almost nothing.
Police turn a blind eye as losses mount
The source described the particular significance of solar panels to rural households. Electricity supply in rural areas is far less reliable than in cities, making solar panels an essential household item. “People scraped together what they had, paying high interest to get them, and thieves are just taking everything,” the source said. “Local people are in an uproar.”
Among the more striking cases, some households had already purchased imported fertilizer and seeds in preparation for their private plots, only to have those supplies stolen outright. In at least one instance, a thief made off with an aluminum pot that still had cooked food in it.
The Ministry of Social Security (the domestic public security agency responsible for law enforcement and social order in North Korea, operating through local safety officers) has responded to the outbreak of theft with what the source described as deliberate indifference. “Safety officers here only get moving when there is something in it for them,” the source said. “In practice they don’t catch thieves or take steps to reduce the harm to local people. They mostly leave it alone while putting on a show of doing something.”
Local people have drawn a pointed contrast with police behavior during the autumn harvest season, when safety officers deploy heavily across rural areas to prevent any grain from leaving state hands. The comparison has fueled anger. “In the autumn, safety officers are obsessed with cracking down to make sure not even a single ear of corn slips through,” the source said. “They’re so aggressive about it that local people compare them to the reviled Japanese colonial police. But when local people beg them to catch thieves, the response is that there is nothing they can do. People’s opinion of safety officers is getting worse and worse.”
The source said the toll on already impoverished rural households is deepening. “Rural people’s difficult lives keep failing to improve and are only becoming more desperate,” the source said.
Reporting from inside North Korea
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