Believers in north Korea
april 2009

.......North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is located on the northern half of the Korean Peninsula.   Its capital and largest city is Pyongyang.  The Amnok River is its border with China, and the Tumen River in the extreme north-east is the border with Russia.  To the South, it borders with South Korea. 

.......The peninsula was governed by the Korean Empire until it was occupied by Japan following the 1905 Russo-Japanese war.  In 1945, at the end of World War II, the peninsula was divided into Soviet and U.S. occupied zones.  In 1948, North Korea refused to participate in a United Nation’s supervised election which led to the creation of two separate Korean governments and caused the Korean war (1950-53).

.......North Korea is a one party state under a united front led by the Korean Worker’s Party.  The country's government presents itself as a socialist republic, although it is widely considered by the outside world to be a de facto totalitarian Stalinist dictatorship.  The current leader is Kim Jong-Il, the late president Kim Il-sung's son.

.......Due to mismanagement, heavy militarization, the inefficiency of North Korea's Stalinist-style collective agricultural system, failure in producing consumer goods, and general suppression of the population, North Korea is bankrupt.  From 1995 through 1999 there was large scale famine which left app. three million people dead.  In 2003, it was estimated that 13 million, more than half of the country’s 23 million people, were suffering from malnutrition.  Things have not improved.  North Korea is dependent on foreign aid.  A steady stream of North Koreans flees across the border to China in search for food and jobs, although they risk being caught and deported to their homeland where they face torture and sometimes death.

.......At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a thriving Protestant community in North Korea, but the Japanese occupation, two world wars, the Korean war, and the subsequent communist era, brought severe persecution against Christian believers.  They were regarded as representatives of Western imperialism.  Today, there are   perhaps as many as half a million believers in North Korea.  App. 10,000 are annually sent to labor camps and tortured for their faith.  North Korea tops the list as being the most cruel and repressive government against Christians among all he countries in the world.  The official religion is a quasi-religious personality cult cultivated around the late president Kim Il-sung who was deified after his death and received the title “Eternal President”.  He was entombed in the vast Kumsusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang.