A former female soldier in the North Korean army says there was little food, poor hygiene and a constant risk of sexual assault.
A former soldier says life as a woman in the world’s fourth-largest army was so tough that most soon stopped menstruating. And rape, she says, was a fact of life for many of those she served with.
For almost 10 years Lee So Yeon slept on the bottom bunk bed, in a room she shared with more than two dozen women. Every woman was given a small set of drawers in which to store their uniforms. On top of those drawers each kept two framed photographs. One was of North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung. The second was of his now deceased heir, Kim Jong-il.
It was a decade ago that she left, but she retains vivid memories of the smell of the concrete barracks.
“We sweat quite a bit.
“The mattress we sleep on, it’s made of the rice hull. So all the body odour seeps into the mattress. It’s not made of cotton. Because it’s rice hull, all the odour from sweat and other smells are there. It’s not pleasant.”
One of the reasons for this was the state of the washing facilities.
“As a woman, one of the toughest things is that we can’t shower properly,” says Lee So Yeon.
“Because there is no hot water. They connect a hose to the mountain stream and have water directly from the hose.
“We would get frogs and snakes through the hose.”
The daughter of a university professor, So Yeon, now 41, grew up in the north of the country. Many male members of her family had been soldiers, and when famine devastated the country in the 1990s she volunteered – motivated by the thought of a guaranteed meal each day. Thousands of other young women did the same.
“The famine resulted in a particularly vulnerable time for women in North Korea,” says Jieun Baek, author of North Korea’s Hidden Revolution. “More women had to enter the labour force and more were subject to mistreatment, particularly harassment and sexual violence.”
Juliette Morillot and Jieun Baek say Lee So Yeon’s testimony accords with other accounts they have heard, but warn that defectors have to be treated with caution.
“There is such a high demand for knowledge from North Korea,” says Baek. “It almost incentivises people to tell exaggerated tales to the media, especially if that comes with nice pay cheque. A lot of defectors who don’t want to be in the media are very critical of ‘career defectors’. It’s worth keeping this in mind.”
Information from official North Korean sources, on the other hand, is liable to be pure propaganda.
Lee So Yeon was not paid for her interview with the BBC.
To begin with, buoyed by a sense of patriotism and collective endeavour, the 17-year-old Lee So Yeon enjoyed her life in the army. She was impressed with her allocated hairdryer, although infrequent electricity meant she had little use for it.
Daily routines for men and women were roughly the same.
