A South Korean newspaper sheds a little light on life in the socialist workers' paradise of North Korea:
Citing interviews with North Korean defectors, a Seoul-based research institute said yesterday that the regime in Pyongyang is continuing an aggressive campaign to suppress underground churches in the country.
The 2005 North Korea Human Rights White Paper published by the Korea Institute of National Unification reported a number of executions of religious figures operating underground Protestant churches in the North. In 2001, five people found guilty of conducting missionary work were executed by firing squad in Nampo.
North Korean defectors are quoted in the report as saying that Pyongyang is doing everything it can to stop the spread of Protestantism in the communist country. According to the report, 86 members of underground churches were rounded up in the early 1990s in Anak, South Hanghae province, some of whom were executed while the rest were sent to political prisons.
A North Korean defector said he had once participated in a three-year long operation to uproot an underground church in 1996. Since 1997, North Korea has been instructing its people to report any kind of proselytizing to the authorities. As a pretense that religious freedom exists in the North, Pyongyang has built a number of churches, but underground churches have been vigorously suppressed.
According to the report, economic crimes in particular continue to be punished through public executions. Disclosures were also made detailing executions of people who had been selling human flesh at the height of the country's food crisis in the late 1990s. The research institute said a number of defectors had given testimony about the sale of human flesh.
They're so hungry for food that they'll eat human flesh. They're so hungry for God that they'll risk imprisonment or death in order to find Him. The poor masses of North Korea find themselves languishing in a state-imposed hell. They're starving both physically and spiritually, but their leaders are determined to manufacture nuclear weapons which will neither fill their bellies nor nourish their souls. For what?
