North Korea Alert

Kim Jong-un, the current leader of North Korea, comes from a long line of  brutal rulers.

As North Korea has recently been in the headlines because of their brazen and shameless threats to the United States and because of the cannibalism to which their starving citizens are stooping, I want to remind my readers about some articles I wrote for Christian Voice about North Korea in general and the persecution of North Korean Christians in particular. I assembled these resources after speaking first-hand with those who had been involved helping North Koreans to escape, including interviews with military personnel involved in counter-espionage.

To download the collection of resources, click on the following link: 

North Korea Resources

I assembled these resources after speaking first-hand with those who had been involved helping North Koreans to escape.

Also, see the news story published yesterday about photographs of North Korea's concentration camps that were generated using Google Earth. The report tells how "As many as 250,000 political prisoners and their families toil on starvation rations in the mostly remote mountain camps", but what it does not mention is that many of these families are Christians who have been taken to these starvation camps as a punishment for believing in Jesus.

To get an idea of what goes on in these camps, read my book review of Kang Chol-Hwan’s chilling exposé of the system after his own imprisonment of ten years. The treatments that Christians and other political prisoners are subjected to at these camps include such things as:

• making prisoners watch other prisoners being executed and then forcing them to throw stones at the corpses working prisoners to death through hard labour
• forcing prisoners to live in permanent situations of deliberately contrived semi-starvation
• placing prisoners in a 1.5-meter-square (16.5-feet-square) punishment cell for a week or more, where they are unable to sit up or lie down
• forcing prisoners to remain for long periods in the cold
• raping women with tools until they are dead
• routine infanticide and forced abortions, including stamping on the necks of babies until they die
• water torture
• motionless-kneeling for long periods (detainees who move while they are supposed to be kneeling motionless are handcuffed from the upper bars of their cells with their feet suspended off the floor)
• beating prisoners to death
• sleep deprivation
• cutting off women’s breasts
• forcing detainees to beat each other
• breaking fingers

At this point, there isn't much we can do other than pray for God to bring a miracle of deliverance to this country, which is a relic of the Cold War era. The other thing we can do is to educate ourselves. I am constantly meeting Christians who have no idea that their fellow brothers and sisters are suffering in Nazi-style concentration camps because the media, fixated on the Middle East, all but completely ignores the problem.