5 N. Korean Christians held for ‘illegal’ prayer gathering

UCA News reporter

A child stands before a propaganda mosaic in Pyongyang on Dec 1, 2016. (Photo: Jones/AFP/Getty Images)

Five Christians remain in police detention following their arrest in communist North Korea for allegedly conducting an 'illegal' underground prayer gathering at the end of April, says a report.

Those arrested are members of the same family whose prayer meeting at their home was raided following a tipoff from an unknown informant, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on May 28.

The weekly prayer at the family's farmhouse in Tongam, a village near the city of Sunchon in South Pyongan province, was stopped by police who took them away.

An unnamed resident told RFA that those arrested did not violate any law as they were not engaged in any public display or propagation of their faith during the gathering on April 30.

They were praying and reading the Bible together, she said. They got together with their relatives and [prayed] 'Oh Jesus, Lord Jesus…,' like that. And then they got arrested, the resident said.

At the site of the worship service, the police retrieved dozens of Bible booklets and arrested all in attendance, the resident added.

All for Jesus, even in death

Despite pressure from authorities, the five detained Christians have refused to renounce their religion, the source said.

A staff member of the judicial agency told us that the [believers] refused to tell where they got their Bibles and said, 'All for Jesus, even in death,' the source said.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USIRF) ranks North Korea as one of the worst violators of religious freedom or belief in the world.

The ultra-communist government reportedly continues to execute, torture, arrest, and physically abuse individuals for their religious activities, the report said.

US-based Christian rights group Open Doors claimed in a report that 50,000-70,000 Christians are imprisoned in North Korea.

Open Doors reported that North Korean Christians experience persecution that was violent and intense and that life for Christians … is a constant cauldron of pressure; capture or death.

According to a second unnamed resident, Tongam village had a large church building that stood even after the Japanese occupied the Korean Peninsula in 1905 and made Shinto the state religion.

That church was at the foot of the mountain, the second resident said. I knew about it because my mother told me it was where the missionaries had been before liberation [from Japanese rule in 1945].

The village was raided twice by the security forces in 1997 and 2005 and believers were sent to forced labor camps.

Sunchon had two Catholic and 31 Protestant churches before the peninsula was freed from Japanese rule. In the past few decades, most of the believers disappeared due to state purges.

Christians were tortured and killed

Korea was a united nation and ruled by the Joseon dynasty for centuries (1392-1887) until the Japanese occupation. Christianity started to spread and thrived in the 18th and 19th centuries despite persecution from the Joseon rulers.

Japan's colonial rule ended in 1945 after World War II and Korea was split into two. The democratic South sided with the West while a communist regime took over the North under Soviet influence.

Disagreements over unification consequently led to the Korean War (1950-53), when communist forces invaded the South, leaving about four million dead and some 10 million displaced.

The communists unleashed brutal persecution against Christians by branding them as collaborators of US-led Western powers. Churches were destroyed and Christians were tortured and killed, forcing most Christians to flee to the South.

The USCIRF report pointed out that anyone caught practicing religion or even suspected of harboring religious views in private is subject to severe punishment, including arrest, torture, imprisonment, and execution in North Korea.

In an October 2020 white paper, the NGO Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB) reported 1,411 cases of religious persecution including 126 killings and 94 disappearances.

The report was based on eyewitness accounts of defectors from North Korea between 2007 and July 2020 and other sources.

Despite strict curbs on religions, Christians continue to practice their faith by maintaining a low profile, reports say.

Bibles and other religious materials are smuggled into the country across the Chinese border and distributed through a secret network established by believers.