North Korean Christians facing new wave of terror

Believers hunted down and executed while their families sent to camps as persecution intensifies

NORTH Korea has intensified its persecution of Christians, executing believers and incarcerating their families in labour camps, aid groups have reported.

As Kim Jong-un seeks to tighten his grip on power, Open Doors, a mission organisation that supports persecuted Christians, said the Pyongyang regime was hunting down underground churches, and there had been a rise in reported incidents of violence.

In one incident, Open Doors said, several dozen North Korean believers from different underground churches were executed.

More than 100 members of their families were said to have been rounded up and sent to labour camps, the group said in its latest World Watch List, which tracks clampdowns on religious freedom.

Thomas Müller, the group’s Asia researcher, told The Sunday Telegraph there were nine known incidents in which Christians were sent to labour camps or executed between Oct 1 2021 and Sept 30 2022.

The information came from trusted North Korean sources, but exact numbers were difficult to ascertain as entire families were often taken away in the middle of the night, he said.

The reports are impossible to independently verify because of North Korea’s information blackout.

The country is estimated to have between 200,000 and 400,000 clandestine Christians, mainly in the west where many settled after an “explosion” of the religion in 1907.

The parents of Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, are said to have been devout Christians, before their son took power and developed his own cult of personality.

Mr Müller said Christians were now being caught in a wider push to flood the country with Kim family ideology, which has been reinforced by a 2020 “anti-reactionary thought law” to punish behaviour such as possessing Bibles.

Radio Free Asia reports that parents have been threatened with prison if their children watch foreign media, “dance suggestively” or “talk like a South Korean”.

“They are really fiercely active against everything that even smells like South Korean or Western culture. Christianity is a dangerous part of this,” said Mr Müller. The regime feared Christians after studying the influence of the religion in the collapse of the Iron Curtain in Europe in the 1980s, he said.

The North Korean regime has tried to stamp out Christianity for decades.

Timothy Cho, who became a Christian while in prison after the first of two attempts to flee North Korea, and now works with Open Doors in the UK, said: “Christianity is always the number one group to be eliminated… I speak for those who cannot speak. People who escape from those circumstances must tell their story.”