Every day in North Korea’s prison camps, 30,000 Christians rise in the predawn hours, eat a few mouthfuls of corn porridge and cabbage, and trudge to an assigned workplace. They then spend about 15 hours toiling in coal mines, cleaning and maintaining the camp, or doing farm work or construction work. In late evening, they return to housing units or apartments above their workplace to eat the same meager meal before falling to sleep on concrete floors. Other Christians are not so fortunate. Instead of laboring for hours at backbreaking work under the eye of cruel guards, they’re locked in torture chambers and underground prisons. Survivors of North Korean prison camps have described being locked in cages like animals, forced to stand for hours in tortuous positions and beaten until they vomited blood. Most of those who have disappeared into kwanliso in recent years have been found guilty of one of three crimes: they tried to flee North Korea, they had unauthorized contact with citizens of South Korea, or they were revealed as Christians. According to testimony before the United Nations, Christianity in North Korea “has been compared to a drug, narcotics, a sin and a tool of Western and capitalist invasion.” The work of Christian missionaries is “akin to vampirism.” While Christianity is not explicitly illegal and a few show churches are even allowed in Pyongyang, in practice, authorities consider adherence to the Christian faith a political crime. State security makes concerted efforts to identify Christians. Agents are trained to suppress religious activities and to systematically interrogate repatriated citizens about their contact with churches and missionaries while outside North Korea. Those found to have engaged in such conduct face harsher punishment. The 30,000 believers in these concentration camps are prisoners of a war being waged on Christians in North Korea. It’s a war that began in 1948, when North Korea was established as a state. North Koreans, who share the gospel, as Mrs. Park did, pay a high personal price. Secret Christians there have known and accepted this for years. They fully expect their faith to result in their imprisonment. However, a Christian who works closely with North Korean defectors said they do not regard imprisonment with surprise or outrage; on the contrary, they regard the prison camps as their mission field and view everything leading to their imprisonment as training.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 09:30:08 +0000
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