Author Archives for Grant Montgomery

The North Korean dictatorship of the mind

Posted on by

Excerpts of “Dear Leader” by Jang Jin-sun, a North Korean poet who caught the eye of Kim Jong Il, and was eventually invited for a private audience with him; then later defected.

As I progressed through school, … I had no choice but to immerse myself, like everyone else, in the Supreme Leader. … Even when I turned to novels or poetry, whatever book I opened, it was the same: the Korean language served to tell the story of two protagonists alone, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

In North Korea, gaining access to any foreign culture is a crime of “revisionism”, but there is a “hundred copy collection” (each book limited to a hundred copies) available to the elite, so that they might receive a cultural grounding to help them carry out their jobs as leaders, diplomats and propagandists. … In the strict apartheid of North Korea, the use of language is tightly controlled across different classes of people. Above all, the language used for reference to the Supreme Leader is set apart in its grammar and vocabulary. Kim Il-sung is always “great”, and “greatness” must always belong to the Supreme Leader alone; but Byron taught me that the word could be used to describe any one of us, and that every one of us could dare to partake in such qualities.

I know that no dictatorship can be successful merely by force. A dictator may use a form of religious cult to demand an unquestioning and heartfelt obedience from each individual, or a myth of racial superiority to bind the loyalty of many to one selfish cause. North Korea is no exception in the modern history of totalitarianism. There are the brutal political camps that physically shut away the lives of North Korean people; but there is also a dictatorship of the mind, the political prison where thought and expression are stifled. North Korea’s dictatorship of force over its people – its police-state system, the inescapable surveillance, the party’s invocation of the “Supreme Leader’s will”, overruling even the national constitution – cannot end while the dictatorship of the mind prevails.

The only power that will undermine the dictatorship of the mind is the realization that it is possible not only for the regime to lie to its people, but that it has done so, deliberately and constantly. My people cannot be free until each of us acknowledges that the Revolutionary History of the Leader is not the true reality of North Korea.

[New Statesman] 

The North Korean Gulag

Posted on by

In February, an unprecedented United Nations Commission of Inquiry (COI) released a report that exhaustively documents the scope of North Korea’s repression. In uncharacteristically blunt language drawing in part on hours of testimony from North Korean refugees and defectors, the COI laid out the systemic and unparalleled horrors of human rights abuses in the country. It concluded that North Korea’s government was committing crimes against humanity against its own people and called on the nations of the world to act.

Foremost among these crimes is the continuing existence of political prison camps that share many attributes of the Nazi concentration camps or the Soviet gulags. While hard numbers understandably vary widely, most experts agree that between 100,000 and 200,000 North Koreans are currently held in a network of vast camps, some of which are the size of small cities. Maintained separately from the prisons for ordinary crimes, North Korea’s gulags subject prisoners to appalling conditions. Torture and public executions are commonplace. Prisoners lack adequate food, clothing, healthcare, and housing. And under North Korea’s ruthless system, three generations of families are punished for the so-called offenses of a single person.

Read more    

North Korea warns against UN human rights office in South Korea

Posted on by

North Korea warned of “strong” action against a UN office which will be set up in South Korea to monitor human rights violations in the communist country.

The North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea slammed South Korea for accepting a request from the Geneva-based Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to open a field office in Seoul, which a spokesman labeled “an anti-DPRK (North Korea) plot-breeding organization aimed at launching aggression and bringing down the social system” in the North.

Seoul decided in late May to allow the establishment of the UN office, a move welcomed by rights bodies as a public manifestation of international concern over the state of human rights in North Korea. In a resolution following a report by UN investigators, the council in March condemned “systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations” in the North.

The UN Human Rights Council in Geneva has expressed hope that the new office will improve the efficiency of investigations into human rights violations in the North, and could even reduce their frequency and intensity.

[AFP]

The long route from North Korea to South Korea

Posted on by

Two days back, a combined force of Thai Navy, police and local Task force came across a group of 15 North Korean refugees during a routine patrol in northern Thailand, as the North Koreans were walking from a Mekong river bank.

North Koreans typically use the border area in Chiang Rai as a base for entering Thailand. More than 5,000 North Koreans have been arrested in Chiang Rai over the past five years and charged with illegal entry.

north korean defector route

These refugees escape North Korea and enter China where they may stay for a week to 6 months while they gather sufficient funds from various help organizations and then get onto the waiting list. It’s then about a ten day trip down through China and Laos. Then a short overnight 5 hour minivan ride through Laos and then smuggled across the Mekong and into Chiang Khong, where they cross the river.

If they are caught in either China of Laos they are deported back to North Korea. But once the North Koreans make it across the river they are usually eventually transported to the South Korean Embassy in Bangkok. Once into the South Korean Embassy in Bangkok, they may ultimately be provided air transportation to Seoul.

Another American detained in North Korea over a Bible

Posted on by
3

North Korea announced Friday that it has detained a U.S. citizen who it says entered the secretive country as a tourist and broke the law. The North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency gave the American’s name as Jeffrey Edward Fowle, saying he arrived as a tourist on April 29.

The news brings the number of Americans believed to be held in the communist nation to three.

Citing unidentified diplomatic sources, the Japanese news agency Kyodo reported that Fowle was part of a tour group and that he was detained in mid-May after allegedly leaving a Bible in a hotel where he had been staying.

North Korea said in late April it was holding a different American man, who it claimed came the country seeking asylum. He tore his tourist visa and shouted that “he would seek asylum” and “came to the DPRK (North Korea) after choosing it as a shelter,” KCNA said. KCNA identified that man as Miller Matthew Todd, who it says was taken into custody on April 10.

North Korea is also holding Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American missionary who was sentenced to 15 years hard labor in 2013 by a court that said he had carried out acts aimed at bringing down the regime of leader Kim Jong Un.

[CNN]

Reasons why North Korea is not the worst place on earth to be a Christian

Posted on by

North Korea has been described as “the worst place on earth to be a Christian.” The leader of one ministry working with the North Korean Underground Church points out that is not how the Christians of North Korea themselves feel, as well as offering his own perspective.

The Rev. Eric Foley, CEO of Seoul USA, says “Our reckoning that North Korea is the worst place to be a Christian says more about our own understanding of Christianity than it does about North Korea.” Adds Foley, “North Korean underground Christians are among the least likely group to defect since they feel their existence in North Korea has divine purpose.”

Foley offers his list of “10 Reasons North Korea is not the Worst Place to be a Christian”, amongst them:

  1. If you are a Christian in a country where no Christians are suffering for Jesus you probably ought to be more concerned — than if you are a Christian in a country where nearly every Christian is suffering for Jesus.
  2. Jesus said, “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you…For your reward is great in heaven” (Matthew 5: 11–12).
  3. We Western Christians sometimes confuse God with Mammon. North Korean Christians daily see the difference clearly.

 

Missionary activity in North Korea

Posted on by

Missionaries have sought to evangelize in North Korea, as the totalitarian country forbids independent religious activities. Although North Korea contains a number of state-controlled churches, they are considered for show to international audiences, according to a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea.

Religion, especially Christianity, is viewed as a political threat because the state does not condone any belief system other than its official state ideology, according to the report.

Witnesses claim that underground churches function inside North Korea, according to the U.N. report. Also, missionaries and underground churches have secretly set up in China near the border to aid defectors.

North Korea is currently holding Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American, who was arrested in November 2012. Bae was sentenced in May 2013, accused of trying to topple the North Korean government and bringing religious activities into the country. He has remained in North Korean custody despite efforts by the U.S. and his family.

More recently, North Korea’s Supreme Court sentenced a South Korean man to life of hard labor for committing “hostile acts” against the country, according to its state-run news agency, KCNA. The South Korean, identified as Kim Jong Uk, averted the death sentence because he allegedly “repented of his crimes,” which included an attempt to set up an underground church inside the country.

Kim said he had worked as a missionary for several years on the Chinese side of the border with North Korea, running a church that sought North Korean converts.

[CNN]

North Korea sentences South Korean Christian to hard labor for life

Posted on by
1

North Korea said Saturday it has sentenced a South Korean Baptist missionary to hard labor for life for allegedly spying and trying to set up underground churches, the latest in a string of missionaries to run into trouble in the rigidly controlled North.

North Korean state media said the missionary was tried Friday and admitted to anti-North Korean religious acts and “malignantly hurting the dignity” of the country’s supreme leadership, a reference to the ruling Kim family. The rival Koreas have different English spelling styles for Korean names, so the North called the missionary Kim Jong Uk, but Seoul has previously referred to him as Kim Jung Wook.

North Korea’s official news agency KCNA said in its report on the trial, “The accused admitted to all his crimes: he committed anti-DPRK religious acts, malignantly hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK overseas and tried to infiltrate into Pyongyang … for the purpose of setting up an underground church and gathering information about the internal affairs of the DPRK while luring its inhabitants into South Korea and spying on the DPRK.”

Kim had been based largely in Dandong, in China, since 2007, from where he helped North Korean defectors get to South Korea via Thailand, Laos and other countries. Kim was born in 1964, Joo said, making him 49 or 50.

In August 2012, a group of 12 North Korean women were caught by Chinese authorities while they were at Kim’s shelter and sent back to North Korea.

Christian missionaries have been drawn over the years to totalitarian North Korea, which tolerates only strictly sanctioned religious services. North Korean defectors have said that the distribution of Bibles and secret prayer services can mean banishment to a labor camp or execution.

[AP and Agence France-Presse]

North Korea-Japan deals serves both ends

Posted on by

Both Japan and North Korea have their own reasons for engaging with each other, separate agendas that led to this week’s landmark agreement on the abduction issue between the two countries.

Tokyo wants tangible progress on the long-standing issue, as abductees’ family members are growing old. North Korea, meanwhile, has become increasingly isolated in the international community, prompting it to turn to Japan for help.

During talks between senior government officials of the two countries in Stockholm this week, North Korea agreed to fully investigate the fate of Japanese nationals abducted by its agents and suspected abductees, while Japan pledged to lift some of its sanctions against North Korea.

North Korea has agreed that the probe will cover not only the 12 people recognized by the Japanese government as abduction victims, including Megumi Yokota, but also about 470 “specially designated missing persons” who are believed to have been abducted by Pyongyang.

Despite the much-heralded agreement, however, it is still open to question whether Pyongyang will follow through.

[The Yomiuri Shimbun]

The best books on North Korea

Posted on by

From firsthand accounts of gulag survivors to memoirs of defectors once part of the top echelons of government, here’s a pick of the best books on the secretive kingdom from The Guardian:

1. Aquariums of Pyongyang: 10 years in the North Korean Gulag
The story of Kang Chol-hwan, a defector who spent 10 years in the notorious Yodok camp because his family was under suspicion for having lived in Japan. Billed as “part horror story, part historical document, part political tract”. Kang defected to South Korea a few years after his release, and went on to work as a journalist for Chosun Ilbo.

2. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
Barbara Demick’s critically acclaimed novel follows the lives of six citizens in the north-eastern city of Chongjin through the tumultuous period after the great leader Kim Il-sung dies and is replaced by his son Kim Jong-il. Demick, the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, based the book on the accounts of of six North Korean defectors and photos and videos smuggled out of the country.

3. North Korea: State of Paranoia
A change of pace from Paul French in this analysis of the history and politics of the country. The trade review promises “a provocative and alarming account of what is a potentially explosive nuclear tripwire”. The book focuses on the economy which French, who also wrote the best-seller Midnight in Peking, argues is central to understanding the policy shifts and leadership.

4. Escape from Camp 14
This international best-seller is another harrowing testimony from the prison camps. American journalist Blaine Harden tells the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only known person to have been born in a gulag and escaped.

5. Dear Leader
The most recent release on this list, Dear Leader is described as “a very rare, first hand account into life in the North Korean society” told by Jang Jin-sung, a former member of the elite.

6. The Orphan Master’s son
The novel by American writer Adam Johnson tells the story of Pak Jun-do, the North Korean John-Doe, son of an orphan master, who has never met his mother. The book was widely praised earning Johnson the Pulitzer prize for fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2013.

7. Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader
By Bradley K Martin, a 900 pages portrait of Kim II-sun and Kim Jong-iI, which Daily NK says is an “excellent, well-researched insight into the nature of the North Korean regime, the way it indoctrinates from birth, the way it controls, monitors and crushes dissent.”

8. This is Paradise! My North Korean Childhood
The story of Kang Hyok’s childhood in North Korea, co-authored by Philippe Grangereau. Kang lived through famine in the north, the hardest hit area of the country, an account of country living under a disturbing notion of “paradise”.