Kim calls for an "arduous march" against hunger like the one launched in the 1990s

North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, urged North Korea's sole party, the Workers' Party, on Thursday to implement a new “hard march,” the campaign that the Pyongyang regime appealed to during the famine of the United States. 1990s of the last century, given the economic difficulties that the country is going through, surrounded by sanctions and the pandemic.

The “arduous march” was a propaganda campaign that began in 1993 in which North Koreans were urged to take inspiration from the havoc that the country's founder, Kim Il-sung, the current leader's grandfather, allegedly suffered in his fight against colonization. Japanese, to face a famine that could cause up to three million deaths.

Kim made this reference in the speech published on Friday by the North Korean news agency KCNA and with which he closed on Thursday a conference of secretaries of the Workers' Party cells held in Pyongyang.

The North Korean leader said that he has decided to ask party members at different levels to “carry out another new and more difficult 'arduous march' to relieve the people of difficulties” and also to “provide them with optimal material and cultural well-being. ”.

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"There are many obstacles and difficulties on our way, and therefore our effort to make the decisions of the eighth congress of the party a reality is not always going to be a placid journey," Kim warned the secretaries of the party cells gathered in Pyongyang, without making more specific references.

At the Workers' Party congress held last January, the North Korean leader himself admitted that North Korea is going through its “worst days” in reference to the hardships generated by the sanctions applied to it as punishment for its weapons programs.

Added to this is the ravages of the pandemic in the impoverished country, which closed its borders in January 2020, preventing the entry of tourists and foreign investment.

Thorough border controls have even almost completely eliminated trade with China since October 2020, according to customs data from Beijing.

North Korea gets 90% of its imports from China, and outlets with contacts within the hermetic country have reported shortages of basic goods, from food to medicine, for months.

The situation of extreme isolation has also forced many diplomats and workers from international organizations and NGOs to leave the country, where there are practically no observers outside the regime.

In its latest report to the World Health Organization (WHO), sent at the end of March, North Korea assures that it had tested 22,389 people without having detected a single positive for covid-19.

Fable against hunger

When the North Korean public food distribution system began to collapse as a result of the disappearance in 1991 of the USSR - a major economic sponsor of the regime - state propaganda began to appeal to the spirit of the "arduous march", in relation to an episode allegedly biography of the country's founder, Kim Il-sung.

The story, which many experts consider a fable to glorify the grandfather of the current leader, tells that the North Korean "eternal president" survived the entire winter from 1938 to 1939 fighting in Manchuria the troops of the Japanese Empire, then colonial dominator of the Korean peninsula and that Chinese province.

Supposedly Kim Il-sung and his guerrillas (whom the official propaganda considers the liberators of the country, ignoring the Japanese defeat in World War II), according to the experts cited by EFE, successfully faced "snow storms", "starvation "," Thousands of enemies "and temperatures" below 20 degrees.