▲ North Korean military guards over the Imjin River, Gaepoong-gun, North Korea, North Korea, seen from the Unification Observatory
A North Korean defector, who returned to the South while serving as a soldier in the Demilitarized Zone North Korean troops, told the US Wall Street Journal that the DMZ North Korean troops reported corruption.
In the interview at the end of 2017, Mr. Roh Chul-min in his early 20s, who returned to the south, evaluated North Korean troops as saying, "If you have money, you can avoid anything, including training.
Roh returned to cross the military demarcation line in December of the same year, about three months after being deployed to a unit in the DMZ in the second half of 2017.
As Roh was placed in the DMZ, he expected full servings and organized leadership and training, but Roh explained that corruption, which is known to be filled with elite personnel, is also prevalent.
Bribery solves a lot of things, including promotion and training outbreaks. Some soldiers give unit commanders $150 a month in bribery and fall out of the mid-winter border service, receive additional servings and winter clothes, and even call home every week. Noh revealed that he enjoyed the'preferential'.
Mr. Roh, who was poor and had no money to bribe, said he was frustrated to see other colleagues getting a good night's sleep and the privilege of going to a nearby market to buy bread.
On one day in December 2017, on the way to the DMZ guard post, he rolled the barbed wire with a rifle, crawled under it, and ran south to succeed.
(Photo = Yonhap News)