North Korea arrests 5 Christians during clandestine church service

Like every Sunday at 5 am, the five Christians met at the farm to pray and study the Bible. But this time the police were waiting for them.

Alerted by an informant, authorities arrested the believers accused of believing in God, a crime in a country where all religion is illegal except the reverence everyone must show for the country’s leader Kim Jong Un and his leaders. previous. his father and his grandfather.

Sources told Radio Free Asia’s Korean Service that the Christians, arrested on April 30, are relatives who met weekly at the farm in Tongam village, outside the city of Sunchon in South Pyongan province, in the center of North Korea.

“At the site of the worship service, the police recovered dozens of Bible booklets and arrested all attendees,” a resident of the province told RFA on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

She said an informant tipped off the police about the secret meeting on Sunday morning.

News of the raid quickly spread throughout Sunchon, another resident who witnessed the arrest told RFA.

“They were praying and reading the Bible together,” he said. “They got together with their families and (prayed) ‘Oh Jesus, Lord Jesus…’, like this. And then they were arrested.”

If the past is any indication, believers will be sent to labor camps to serve time. RFA was unable to confirm its status after the raid.

christian roots

It was not the first time that the authorities detained Christians in Tongam.

The town’s underground churches were raided in 2005 and 1997, and believers were sent to do forced labor in concentration camps.

Tongam has a history with Christianity. It was once the site of a large church 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 in Tongam village,” said the second resident. “I knew because my mother told me that it was where the missionaries had been before the liberation (from Japanese rule in 1945).”

Sunchon had two Catholic churches and 31 Protestants before the peninsula was liberated from Japanese rule, according to a pastor with experience leading missions in North Korea.

The Soviet-controlled northern half of Korea after 1945 adhered to the idea that religion was the opium of the masses and thus promoted atheism. When North Korea was established in 1948, all religions became illegal. It was then that many of the churches in Sunchon began to disappear and the believers in Tongam had to go underground.

North Korea is known to execute, torture and physically abuse people for their religious activities, according to the US State Department’s 2022 International Religious Freedom Report.

It is one of 17 countries identified as engaging in or condoning systematic, ongoing, and serious violations of freedom of religion and belief, according to the 2023 annual report of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Bibles and other religious materials are usually smuggled into the country across the border with China, where they are distributed to underground churches through a secret network, the second source said.

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

“A staff member from the law enforcement agency told us that (believers) refused to say where they got their Bibles, saying, ‘All for Jesus, even in death.'”

Translated Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.