Inside country most dangerous to celebrate Christmas where citizens risk death
Dictatorship has reigned supreme in totalitarian North Korea since its formation in 1948.
Independent observers and defectors report systematic and egregious state-sanctioned abuses of power ranging from arbitrary detention and torture to forced labour in prison camps, to the extent that Amnesty International UK describes North Korea as being "in a category of its own when it comes to human rights violations".
Article 3 of the North Korean constitution guarantees religious freedom for its 24 million people, but this is no less of a farce than the regime's paying lip service to democracy via its official title "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea" (DPRK).
All citizens are required to be unfailingly loyal to the cult-like state ideology of "Juche" – which translates to "national self-reliance", a testament to North Korea's long-standing policy of isolationism – such that those who follow a religion or belief do so on pain of imprisonment and sometimes death.
The North Korean state demands total submission to "Kim Jong-unism" or "Comrade Kim Jong-Un's Revolutionary Thought" (KCNA VIA KNS/AFP via Getty Image)In January 2006, police reportedly arrested returned defector and Christian missionary Son Jong-Nam in his Hoeryong home and sentenced him to death on the pretext of espionage. Son died two years later in a Pyongyang prison. His younger brother alleged that Son's grim fate was the result of captors opting for the less public method of death-by-torture in response to campaigns by Christian rights organisations the world over to save him.
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"There are many ways to kill people in North Korea," he told The Associated Press.
Christians appear to be particularly targeted. "Detention periods have been documented as being longer for Christians than other groups, and witnesses have reported that 'identified Christians are interrogated for longer periods, usually under torture', and subjected to some of the worst forms of torture to force them to incriminate others during interrogation", according to a report issued in 2022 by The International Bar Association and The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
Even Christians far less daring than Son Jong-Nam – who is believed to have smuggled 20 Bibles and 10 cassette tapes of hymns into his native land – face unimaginable threats to their safety and dignity.
The recently introduced Reactionary Thought and Culture Denunciation Law makes being a Christian or possessing a Bible a crime against the state.
The anti-persecution charity Open Doors estimates there are 400,000 Christians in North Korea and 50,000-70,000 are currently imprisoned in the country. And Christmas, to all intents and purposes, does not exist.
Speaking to the Independent, North Korean defector Kang Jimin said he was completely unaware of Christmas while living there.
"There is no Christmas in North Korea. I did not know what it was. Christmas is Jesus Christ's birthday, but North Korea is obviously a communist country so people do not know who Jesus Christ is. They do not know who God is. The Kim family is their god."
A source told Open Doors that some Christians do manage to honour Christmas Day even within the confines of North Korea's gulags.
They said: "I met a Christian lady imprisoned for her faith, who celebrated Christmas inside a North Korean labour camp. She had had daily ideological training, where the prison guards read newspapers to the inmates. Christians, therefore, always knew when it was Christmas, so every Christmas day she and her five secret converts would celebrate in the toilet building with a short worship meeting. They sang softly.
"They risked a lot in doing so but miraculously she and the other Christians with her were never caught".
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Meanwhile, the birthday of Kim Jong-Suk, the deceased grandmother of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, falls on Christmas Eve – and is marked by citizens making pilgrimages to her birthplace of Hoeryong.
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