On the bumpy road to North Korea’s top ski resort, work gangs hack and shovel the fresh snowfall to clear the route for busloads of their fortunate fellow citizens.
There are thousands of them.
Men, women and children, red-faced from the blizzard conditions and freezing cold, wrapped up in jackets, scarves and hats, smashing the snow like metronomes with pickaxes and sticks. They the push it aside with makeshift wooden shovels.
Along the twisting mountain road, small groups of uniformed soldiers join the work, but this is overwhelmingly a civilian effort.
Their bicycles sit by the roadside. It’s not clear where the workers have come from — there are no houses visible in the area — as well as who is in charge or who ordered them here.
But for dozens of miles, we weave in and out of of the mass ranks of Kim Jong Un’s snow clearers. Some of them appeared to be aged as young as 11 or 12. Others were teenagers.
There was no sign of snowplows that keep the roads to America’s ski resorts open. This is backbreaking, bone-chilling work by hand — the hands of Kim’s people.
There are no trucks to scatter salt. The workers dig the frozen ground and throw earth and stones on the icy road to keep the few cars that travel here from skidding off.
North Korea’s authoritarian state believes above all in “juche” — or “self-reliance. ”
Its Stalinist-run society relies on the “revolutionary” work done every day by cadres of peasants and factory workers, organised by the ruling party, to maintain and create “a socialist fairyland. ”
So a heavy snowfall must be removed from the roads of the fairyland. The people must respond.
