KFI conducted over one hundred interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, all of those who escaped North Korea, on their experience of religious persecution, dating from 1990 until 2019. More than two hundred Christians were identified as victims.

One story shows how a man who converted to Christianity claimed to have been imprisoned in a metal tiny metal cage with bars “heated with electricity.” While prisoners typically only survived three or four hours in the cage, his prayers helped him endure twelve before he eventually soiled himself and passed out. But even unconscious, the guards continued to beat him after he was removed from the cage, leaving him severely injured.

Women, especially pregnant ones, witnessed horror daily, as some of them were injected with medicine to trigger labour. After giving birth, the newborns would be taken from them, smothered by guards using plastic sheets or cloth sacks and then discarded in a cleaning cupboard.

Only for possessing a Bible, prisoners who were tied to a wooden stake were shot by a firing squad, recalled some interviewees. A Korean Workers’ Party member was arrested for owning a Bible and executed at Hyesan airfield in front of three thousand residents. Others were executed for smuggling Bible pages into the country from China for North Koreans to make prayer books.

The Kim dynasty made the country’s official religion the cult of Kim Il Sung. The country’s supreme leaders are seen as God(s) and all must worship them or they face deadly consequences. North Korea became known as the harshest country in the world in which to live as a Christian.

Source: persecution.org

Image: foreignpolicy.com