Kim Jong-Un mini-skirted female soldiers who serve on North Korea's front line

North Korea female soldiers [Photo:Courtesy]

 

Like robots, their feet rising and falling in perfect unity, hundreds of women soldiers of the North Korean People’s Army march across Kim Il-sung Square in Pyongyang to mark 60 years since the end of the Korean War.

In perfect ranks 24 across, they progress as though a slide rule has been used to place every regimented limb.

Their toes, encased in laced-up, mid-height heels, point at the same angle as the front of each stride stretches out to within inches of the rank in front.

Such togetherness is the result of hundreds of hours of drills in soulless barracks, where the recruits perfect their marching formations either by linking arms, or even by being tied together at the neck with ropes.

It is a show of physical discipline that would be the envy of the corps de ballet at Covent Garden.

But more than any sense of artistry, this scene at the weekend was designed to be a ruthless display of military power.

We are used to seeing this kind of muscle-flexing on old film reels from Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia.

But it is the presence of so many regiments of female soldiers which is so fascinating.

Every woman has her hair cut to exactly the same prescribed length on the nape of the neck.

 Each woman has either one or two medals on her right chest depending on her service record, while they also sport ceremonial cords wrapped around each shoe.

The cap badge shows the red star that appears on the national flag, while the mini-skirted uniform is completed with short socks over flesh-coloured tights.

Though few outside this most secretive of nations are aware of it, more than ten per cent of the army is made up of women — indeed some reports from defectors suggest the figure could be as high as 40 per cent.

Given that the army boasts a total of 1.2 million troops, this means that, in theory, there could be close to half a million women in service.

One of the main reasons is that thousands of male soldiers starved to death or deserted their posts during the great famine which devastated the impoverished nation in the Nineties.

As a result, the ruling party has turned to female soldiers to fill the gaps.

Unlike their male counterparts in the armed forces, these girl soldiers undergo only selective conscription.

They have already been subjected to ideological brainwashing at school, where they learn how to conjugate English verbs with such phrases as ‘We are killing Americans’, or ‘We have killed Americans’, followed by 300 hours’ annual paramilitary training in the obligatory Red Guard Youth.

Most of this takes place at school, or in a dedicated week-long summer camp.

North Koreans are drafted at the age of 17, though those bright enough to go to university join  later and have to undergo six months in a military training camp, since they are more likely to be officer material.

Some facts of life in North Korea cannot be hidden from view, which is why recently the country had to reduce its military minimum height requirement from 4ft 9in (145cm) to 4ft 8in (142cm), to include shorter women unfortunate enough to have been born painfully undernourished during the terrible famines.

-Daily Mail