Mick Hartley

Another peek into life in North Korea, from the Daily NK:

A staffer at a Workers’ Party school in Gangwon Province was recently arrested for allegedly engaging in “anti-socialist and non-socialist activity,” including hoarding food and watching South Korean films.

According to a Daily NK source in Gangwon Province on Monday, “a woman who worked as the financial director of a Workers’ Party school in Gangwon Province was arrested by the anti-socialist and non-socialist task force [Unified Command 82] for engaging in several kinds of non-socialist behavior. The arrest came after adamant complaints from school staff members.”

According to the source, the person in question had spent the seven years since being named to her post pilfering some of the food supplied to the school every quarter for her own use. This caused anger among the school staff, some of whom informed the provincial party committee…

After receiving the complaint from school staff, provincial prosecutors searched the woman’s house. They found not only a house overflowing with food, but also 10 mobile storage devices with South Korean movies and music, a South Korean electric rice cooker and a stack of US dollars.

In particular, the rice cooker’s voice navigation featured a female voice speaking in a South Korean tone, saying, “I will now start cooking delicious rice.”

Prosecutors were reportedly flabbergasted when they heard it, wondering how in the world an employee of a party school could shamelessly use such a device.

In fact, prosecutors are taking even bigger issue with how — even in her daily life — the woman allegedly imitated the speaking style of South Korean women, reenacting lines in South Korean films in view of her neighbors.

Talk about brazen! But she'll pay the price.

“The woman committed a lot of crimes, so nobody knows when the preliminary examination will end,” said the source. “Among the investigators, the feeling is that she’s unlikely to come out of this alive due to the political nature of her crimes.”