ICC Note: In a series of mass executions across North Koreans a handful of the country’s Christians were put to death for owning a Bible. The North Korean government strictly controls the information and ideology that its citizens have access to. The official religion of the state is of the Kim family of rulers and they harshly repress any competing ideologies. Despite the tradition of hostile oppression Christianity is on the rise according to some analysts, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to control the access of information, thus public executions are used to send a message of the danger of competing worldviews.
By Melanie Kirkpatrick
11/14/2013 North Korea (Wall Street Journal) – The Bible is “the most dangerous book on Earth,” George Bernard Shaw famously warned a century ago. Today, Shaw’s words ring true—literally—for the 24 million people of North Korea. Possession of a Bible is a one-way ticket to the gulag or worse.
The worst came true this month for a handful of North Koreans who were caught with Bibles, which are outlawed by the communist regime. The Christians were among a group of 80 North Koreans who were executed by firing squad on Sunday, Nov. 3, according to a report in the South Korean daily, JoongAng Ilbo. Those put to death also included North Koreans accused of watching South Korean DVDs that had been smuggled into the North, or of distributing pornography. The ruling Kim family regime controls every aspect of citizens’ lives, including what information reaches them from the world outside North Korea’s borders. Bibles, foreign DVDs, the Internet, cellphones that can make international calls—all are banned.
The executions were public and took place in seven cities across the country, according to the JoongAng Ilbo. In the port city of Wonsan, “eight people were tied to a stake at a local stadium, had their heads covered with white sacks and were shot with a machine gun.” Ten thousand spectators, including children, were forced to witness the executions.
The families of the victims were dispatched to political prison camps, the paper also reported—a move in keeping with the regime’s long-standing policy of punishing three generations of a family for one member’s transgression. Most inmates do not survive long in North Korea’s prison camps.
Persecuting Christians is a Kim family tradition. North Korea’s young dictator, Kim Jong Un, is the third generation of dictators to kill, torture and imprison Koreans of faith. Like his father, Kim Jong Il, and his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, he understands the threat that Christianity poses to his rule. With its message of individual freedom, Christianity offers a potent alternative to the Kim family cult of personality.
Kim Il Sung mostly eradicated Christianity from North Korea in the 1950s and 1960s through a brutal policy of murdering religious leaders, imprisoning believers who would not recant, and banishing others to remote regions. Yet now Christianity is on the rise. North Koreans are learning about the religion from countrymen who flee to China and receive help from Christians, or from Bibles smuggled into the country by foreign missionaries or dropped from balloons launched from the South.
The only worship permitted in North Korea is that of the Kim family dictators. Every North Korean wears a badge over his heart displaying a photograph of the smiling face of Kim Il Sung, the country’s founder. Citizens are required to adhere to a national belief system called Juche. All citizens must attend meetings, listen to readings from the works of Kim Il Sung, sit through sermons on the meaning of Juche philosophy, and participate in self-criticism sessions. Even calendar dates are expressed in Juche years, with year 1 being 1912, the year of Kim Il Sung’s birth.
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