By Nina Shea
Monday, April 15, 2013
North Korea’s Kim dynasty considers religion a hindrance
to the nation’s socialist evolution. For 50 years, its secret police has waged
a brutal campaign to eradicate religious belief. It has nearly succeeded. But
the numbers of Christian believers are now slowly rising (maybe even in the low
hundreds of thousands) and they must be prepared to pay with their lives for
their faith.
In the early Sixties, Buddhist shrines and temples and
Christian churches were shuttered, and all religious literature and Bibles destroyed.
Religious leaders were either executed or sent to concentration camps. Some
temples that have reopened are mainly historical cultural sites, not active
religious centers. Pyongyang was known in the 1950s as “Asia’s Jerusalem” for
its robust Christian communities, but the five Christian churches that now
exist, all in the capital, are state-operated for international propaganda
purposes.
Run like an impregnable fortress, North Korea bans
human-rights investigations, and the persecution of religious believers, like
other aspects of daily conditions, is barely known. Nevertheless, an important
study by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and a
white paper by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDC), all
based on the testimony of refugees over the past ten years most of whom are not
religious, help piece together a grim picture of what life is like for
Christians and more generally.
These interviews, taken at different times, of different
refugees, by different interviewers, corroborate each other and provide
powerful evidence of pervasive ideological control, religious persecution,
human-rights violations, and government surveillance. These searing voices need
to be heard. A representative sample of them follows:
• “North Korea is a prison without bars. The reason why
the North Korean system still exists is because of the strict surveillance system.
When we provide the information like ‘this family believes in a religion from
their grandfather’s generation,’ the [National Security Agency] will arrest
each family member. That is why entire families are scared of one another.
Everyone is supposed to be watching one another like this. All organizations,
the Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League, and the Women’s League are [gathering
information].”
• “There are churches and Buddhist temples in Pyongyang .
. . built only for . . . foreigners to attend. When foreigners visit Pyongyang
they would go to churches and temples to pray and bow. I never heard of
religious books until I came to China.”
• “A forty-something woman, who lived in a city of North
Pyongan Province, North Korea, was caught with a Bible in her home. She was
seized, dragged from her house, and publicly shot to death. Her execution took
place on the threshing floor of a farm. . . . I was curious why she was to be
shot. Somebody told me she had kept a Bible at her home. Guards tied her head,
her chest, and her legs to a post, and shot her dead. It happened in September
2005.”
• “Based on a tip-off, around January 2005, agents from
the Central Antisocialist Activities Inspection Unit raided my home in a county
of North Hamgyong Province. As a result of their search, they found a Bible. I
was taken into custody to a political prison camp alongside my wife and
daughter. My son, who was staying in China, entered the North without any
knowledge about his family’s detention. He, too, was later taken to the camp.”
• “One cannot even say the word ‘religion.’ North Korea
does have Christians and Catholics. They have buildings but they are all fake.
These groups exist to falsely show the world that North Korea has freedom of religion.
But [the government] does not allow religion or [independent] religious
organizations because it is worried about the possibility that Kim Jong Il’s
regime would be in danger [because] religion erodes society.”
• “In 2001, a woman was taken into custody at a political
prison camp for having talked with her neighbors, who had been to China, about
religion. One of the neighbors was a government spy. She was forced to divorce
her husband, and was detained at a political prison camp and died there.”
• “At Christmas time we used to sing familiar Christmas
carols such as ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Joy to the World.’ Older North Korean
Christians know these too. They sang these carols when they were young. Their
parents were Christians at the time of the great revival in 1907. Now they are
no longer allowed to sing them, because all Christian activity is forbidden.”
• “‘Underground believers’ would be a more appropriate
term than ‘underground church.’ Church would be something like a place where
people can gather and listen to a sermon, but it’s impossible to exist for
long. Instead, underground believers can exist. There is a chance that two
people pair up and hold their hands together to pray. However, a gathering of
three or more is dangerous.”
• “In 2003, I watched three men being taken to a place of
public execution in a county of North Hamgyong Province [in North Korea]. Among
them was a man with whom I had studied the Bible together in China. He was
gagged with rags before his execution. When told to say what he wanted to say
before dying, he said, ‘O Lord, forgive these miserable people.’ And he was
shot dead.”
• “You cannot say a word about [religion or] three
generations of your family can be killed. People who lived before the Korean
War knew [about religion.] But religion was eradicated. We can only serve one
person in North Korea [Kim Jong Il].”
• “Hanging pictures of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il on the
wall is an obligation. The purpose of hanging the pictures is to worship Kim Il
Sung and Kim Jong Il. There is a ritual done before the pictures. [We] worship
Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader who saved us from death and emancipated us from
slavery. If a fire breaks out, people would show their loyalty by running into
the fire to save the portraits. Anyone who gets burned doing this would win
commendation.”
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