Tag Archive: north korea

The North Korean component in the persecution of Christians

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The normally diplomatic Pope Francis recently asserted: “The persecution of Christians today is even greater than in the first centuries of the Church, and there are more Christian martyrs today than in that era.”

To those familiar with the history of early persecution — when Christians were habitually tortured to death, set on fire, fed to lions and dismembered to cheering audiences — his statement may seem exaggerated. But even today, as in the past, Christians are indeed being persecuted for their faith and even tortured and executed.

A January, 2014, Pew Research Center study on religious discrimination across the world found that harassment of Christians was reported in more countries (110) than any other faith.

Open Doors, a nondenominational Christian rights watchdog group, ranked the 50 most dangerous nations for Christians in its World Watch List. The No. 1 ranked nation is North Korea, followed by a host of Muslim countries. (Disturbing indeed is the fact that three of these countries — Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya — were “liberated” in part thanks to U.S. forces, while in the fourth, Syria, the U.S. is actively sponsoring the “rebels,” many of whom are responsible for attacks and kidnappings of Christians.)

North Korea, amongst other Communist countries, is intolerant of Christians; churches are banned or forced underground, and exposed Christians can be immediately executed.

Nothing integral to the fabric of these societies makes them intrinsically anti-Christian. Something as simple as overthrowing the North Korean regime could possibly end persecution there — just as the fall of Communist Soviet Union saw religious persecution come to a quick close in nations like Russia.

To influence these situations, Western nations must make foreign aid contingent on the rights and freedoms of minorities. After all, if we are willing to give billions in foreign aid, often on humanitarian grounds, surely the very least that recipient governments can do is provide humanitarian rights, including religious freedom.

[Read full CNN article] 

Kim Jong-un’s siblings in top posts of North Korean government

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North Korea is more than ever a Kim family business, with leader Kim Jong-un’s older brother Jong-chol playing a key role in ensuring the regime’s longevity, while his younger sister Yeo-jong manages its coffers.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s older brother, Kim Jong-chol (left) and sister, Kim Yeo-jong (right)

Kim Jong-chol, who is rarely spotted in public, is rumored to be in charge of Kim Jong-un’s security. There are claims that he led the operation to arrest Ri Yong-ha and Jang Su-gil, two close confidants of executed eminence grise Jang Song-taek, in December last year. And there is speculation that Jong-chol played a key role in bringing about recent negotiations with Japanese government officials to mend ties amid growing international isolation.

Kim Yeo-jong is reportedly in charge of an agency known as Room 38 under the Workers Party which manages the regime’s coffers and businesses that earn foreign currency. The agency used to be overseen by Jang’s widow, Kim Kyong-hui, who is also Kim Jong-un’s aunt, but Yeo-jong gained control after Jang was executed.

One bureau in the agency exports herbal medicine, rare plants and high-quality lumber, while another oversees a glitzy new department store in Pyongyang as well as 124 other department stores across North Korea. Due to Kim Yeo-jong’s influential position, business is booming, and modern coffee shops in these stores are apparently packed with customers.

North Korea experts say Kim Jong-un, who used to depend heavily on his uncle and aunt, feels he is safer entrusting his siblings with influential jobs.

His half sister Sol-song also apparently holds a key post. Kim Sol-song is the eldest daughter of former leader Kim Jong-il’s second wife, Kim Yong-suk, and majored in economics and politics at Kim Il-sung University. She has served in the Politburo as well as other key posts including the propaganda department. Ken Gause of CNA Corporation said recently that Sol-song has taken charge of the Workers Party secretariat, which would put her at the apex of the organization that controls information flow.

Only Kim’s older half-brother Kim Jong-nam was sidelined in the power struggle early on and lives in lavish exile.

[Chosun Ilbo]

The North Korean dictatorship of the mind

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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] 

Another American detained in North Korea over a Bible

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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

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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

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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

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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]

US government grants for promoting human rights in North Korea

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The call by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) offers applicants grants of up to $350,000 to promote “human rights and democratic principles in North Korea”. Proposals are sought that promote “access to information into, out of, and within North Korea,” the call says, including those involving “the production of media, including visual/video content, for DVDs, USBs, and other methods to send information into North Korea.”

But while many oppose North Korea’s long-standing information blockade and strict censorship laws, several observers told NK News that there could be serious risks for those involved in the transport or consumption of US-funded information, with provisions in the call clearly implying activities that both North Korean and Chinese authorities may view as illegal.

“[The call] is encouraging people to break their country’s laws, with no consideration of the possible consequences,” said James Hoare, a former British Charge D’affaires to Pyongyang. “I doubt whether those who devised these policies have given much thought to the likely consequences.”

As shown in the case of Kenneth Bae, the US national currently serving a 15-year sentence of hard labor in North Korea, Washington’s North Korea policy is not often helped by the arrest of American citizens attempting to share information that Pyongyang views with suspicion.

The grant call welcomes proposals “that support recommendations from the recently released report from the (United Nations) commission of inquiry on North”. While the UN commission operated on a strict “first do no harm” basis to ensure the safety of contributors, the risks involved in moving information in and out of North Korea suggest a contradiction with the State Department’s own strategy to improve human rights in North Korea.

The report, which offers the most comprehensive account of human rights violations in North Korea, explained how local authorities have been known to execute vendors found supplying external media, or tortured or imprisoned end-users found with foreign materials in their possession.

It also referenced the North Korean criminal code, which says that those found “listening to hostile broadcasting and collect[ing], keeping and distribut[ing] enemy propaganda”, would be sentenced to hard labor.”

Because the trafficking of physical information takes place along the Chinese-North Korean border, it could require the illicit movement of individuals and materials, which is likely to break both Chinese and North Korean laws.

Despite the risks involved with getting information into and out of North Korea, two human rights activists said the dangers were worth the benefits. “Brave policies, activists and strong convictions have made progress in human history… Doing nothing for fear that such grants may irritate the North Korean regime is cowardly,” said Eunkyoung Kwon, of Open Radio North Korea, an organization that has received US funding.

Bada Nam, secretary general of the People for Successful Korean Reunification, an organization that helps North Korean defectors in China, said there was a net benefit to the process of getting outside information into North Korea. “Even though it is so dangerous to deliver information inside NK, it is worth it to change the people inside,” Nam said.

“If there is no one providing information into North Korea, the NK people will not gain any access to the real world. I think they have the right to know the truth,” Nam said, adding that “the future is made by the people who take danger together”.

[The Guardian] 

After fleeing North Korea

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The academic work of Professor Clifton Emery, a lecturer at Seoul’s Yonsei University, focuses on the power that social groups and communities wield over the specter of child abuse, and as part of a wider study he is currently interviewing 200 North Korean defectors to examine the risks they face in terms of post-traumatic stress disorder and family violence.

This work has put him in contact with the underground railroad, a network of smugglers and NGOs working to bring North Koreans to safety via a shadowy route that snakes from China to Southeast Asia and finally to Seoul. Many of these refugees are women, who willingly sell themselves as brides to rural Chinese men and then wait, often bearing several children to their husbands, until the opportunity for escape presents itself.

It has also brought Emery close to the aid workers – a handful of Israelis among them – who help the process along. One of his closest Jewish friends these days is Yotam Polizer, the Israeli serving as Asia Director for the NGO IsraAid, which offers trauma care training and workshops. IsraAid has offered training to the counselors and therapists who serve as refugees’ first contacts when they make it to South Korea and to the government-run Hanowan Resettlement Center that sits in the hills south of Seoul. There, the refugees learn the bare bones of democracy, free speech, and capitalism. They are taught that they can say whatever they wish about their government and practice any religion they choose. It’s a paradigm shift of massive proportions.

This evening two dozen aid workers and psychology students gather together in a lecture hall to discuss the intricacies of trauma and how they can identify, salve and treat the emotional wounds of shell-shocked North Korean defectors. Much of that work focuses on nonverbal treatment, be it through art, music, or movement, allowing survivors of the North Korean regime to express themselves without the burden of a written record.

Such a cross-section of humanitarians, Emery says, is typical. “The people doing the work and defectors themselves are all over the map politically,” he says. “You have fundamentalist Christians and you have very secular professional Western organizations and you have IsraAid. What we share in common is a sense of the absolute urgency of this crisis.”

It’s really a question, Emery says, of how much we believe in the term “never again.” He says, “I grew up hearing stories of the Holocaust and hoping that if I had been alive at that time I would have had the moral fortitude to do something. I simply cannot look myself in the mirror and not do something. It’s just a very simple response of the heart.”

[Times of Israel]

Disillusioned by meeting Kim Jong Il

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“Until the day I met Kim Jung Il,” North Korean defector Jang Jin-Sung says, “I truly considered him divine, as someone more holy, like a sage – someone to be revered, someone who was better than us, who was sacrificing his own life for the people.”

Jang, a poet, caught the dictator’s eye, and was invited for a private audience with him.

Unti then, so effective was the regime propaganda machine, Jang told CNN’s Christine Amanpour, that he did not even believe that Kim the elder used the toilet.  “The man I saw standing in front of me was a man, he was a human being. He was not a holy man; he was not a saint; he was not a god. He was a man just like me, who did use the toilet.”

In propaganda, Kim had used “perfectly composed, flowery language,” Jang said, and was deeply reverential of the people. “But when I met him, he just spoke in slang like in a kind of commanding colloquial, working-class slang, even to his most senior men. …. And that was shocking to me.”

From that highest perch of North Korean society, Jang could clearly see for the first time all the lies he had been told. The truth became even starker when he went back to visit his hometown of Sairwon, in the southwest of the country.  “That was when I really witnessed the devastating effects of the famine. That’s where I saw the corpses in the station area just piling up and being taken away.”

As many as 3.5 million people are estimated to have died during North Korea’s severe famine of the 1990s, according to the South Korean NGO Good Friends. (Official North Korean numbers estimate that 220,000 people died.)

Jang also witnessed a public execution [in his hometown]. “It’s considered a method of moral education … So that’s why these executions happen in public places, such as market squares, where people watch it. It becomes a theater.”

A decade ago Jang decided to flee the country. Not even his family knew he was planning to leave.

 [Read full CNN article]