Escape from North Korea (24 page)

Some of the secret Christians in North Korea belong to what Open Doors refers to as the catacomb church. They are remnants of the church that flourished before the establishment of the Democratic People's Republic in 1948 and the ban on religion. These Christians took their worship underground. They have been worshipping in secret for more than half a century and introducing their children to their faith. Carl Moeller, who heads Open Doors USA, explained how Christians in North Korea's catacomb church have survived. “They are like the Jews in Spain in the 1400s,” he said, referring to Jews who pretended to practice Christianity after the Catholic monarch ordered them to convert to Christianity or face expulsion from the country. “They became good Communists on the outside but remained believers on the inside.” Open Doors estimates that fifty to sixty thousand of these Christians worship in the catacomb church in North Korea today.
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A catacomb Christian whom Open Doors sheltered in China gave the organization a tattered copy of a New Testament he'd smuggled out of North Korea. The New Testament dated back to the early 20th century. The family of this catacomb Christian had hidden it ever since Kim Il Sung declared religion illegal.

Open Doors works with North Koreans in both China and North Korea. It operates shelters for refugees in China, it sends Bibles and other religious literature into North Korea, and it supports North Koreans who want to go back to their country as missionaries. Unlike some other missions in China, Open Doors does not recruit North Koreans to be evangelists. It believes that the decision to go knowingly into a life-threatening situation must originate with the individual. “We don't have a program to train refugees to
go to North Korea, but if they want to go, we will support them,” Mueller said. “People love their home country. As strange as that sounds, North Koreans love North Korea. By becoming Christians, they have found freedom. They have a message of hope. They think of their families and want to share that message.”

A typical Christian church in North Korea is tiny. The congregation may consist of only one family, or even just a husband and a wife. Children are excluded from worship until they reach the age when they can keep a secret. A few families occasionally will get together to risk group worship if they can find a way to avoid attracting attention, Moeller said. On Kim Il Sung's birthday, for example, many gatherings are devoted to celebrating him, and a group of house churches might take the opportunity to worship together under the guise of partying.

Voice of the Martyrs also focuses its work on persecuted Christians. Like Open Doors, Voice of the Martyrs dates back to the Cold War, when religion was banned in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It was founded in 1967 by Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian pastor who emigrated to the United States after spending fourteen years in jail because of his religious beliefs. Voice of the Martyrs says it has smuggled ten thousand Bibles into North Korea. It also has dropped Christian literature from balloons launched in South Korea.

Voice of the Martyrs sponsors a program aimed at evangelizing North Korea's elite. It does so by using a technology considered old-fashioned in most of the rest of the world: fax machines. Like every technological device that allows users to communicate with the outside world, fax machines are tightly controlled in North Korea. Their use is strictly limited to government offices and state-sponsored businesses that trade overseas. Voice of the Martyrs spent a year collecting the fax numbers of such enterprises. It now faxes them weekly Christian messages and Scripture passages. The faxes apparently get through. After one round of faxes, Voice of the Martyrs received an
anonymous return fax written in Korean. “We know who you are,” the fax began. “We warn you that if you send this kind of dirty fax again something very bad will happen to you. Don't do something you will regret.”

Seoul USA is another ministry that helps North Koreans. Based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Seoul USA is a network of Christians who aim to mobilize Christians worldwide to support the underground churches in North Korea. Among its projects is the Underground University, a mission school in Seoul that trains North Korean refugees as evangelists.
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After one year of study, the graduates are dispatched to work with North Koreans in one of four mission areas: North Korea, China, South Korea, or among North Korean students and diplomats abroad. Inside North Korea, Seoul USA's mission includes launching and operating what it calls “repression-proof mini–house churches.” These are tiny congregations, often made up of members of a single family.

In recent years, two American Christian activists have entered North Korea illegally, hoping to draw international attention to the plight of Christians in that country. To their supporters, they are committed Christians seeking to share their faith. To their detractors, they are at best misguided, at worst mentally unbalanced.

The first was Robert Park, a twenty-nine-year-old man from Arizona, who walked across the frozen Tumen River on Christmas Day in 2009. He carried a Bible and a letter to the dictator at the time, Kim Jong Il, demanding that he free all political prisoners in North Korea and then resign. As he touched North Korean soil, Park shouted, “I bring God's love.” An American friend of Robert Park described him as a “zealous Christian.” “Robert is fiercely adamant” about the human rights situation in North Korea, the friend said, “particularly the suffering of the Christians in the gulag.”

Robert Park was arrested and taken to Pyongyang. After he read a confession on North Korean TV, North Korea announced he had repented and let him go. He was freed after forty-three days in
detention. Park later said his apology was fake and had been dictated to him. In an interview on South Korean TV, he gave a harrowing account of his imprisonment, which he said included beatings, torture, and sexual abuse. In early 2012, Park said he would bring a lawsuit against North Korea in a U.S. court.

On January 25, 2010, exactly one month after Robert Park crossed the Tumen and entered North Korea illegally, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, from Boston, followed his example. Gomes had known Robert Park in Seoul, where they had both lived and worked for a while. They attended the same church. Gomes was an English teacher in Seoul and a frequent protestor against North Korea's human rights violations. Like Robert Park, he was arrested immediately upon entering North Korea. Unlike his friend, he received a much more draconian sentence: eight years of hard labor and a fine of $700,000 for illegal entry. Seven months after his arrest, North Korea granted him amnesty and released him in the custody of former American President Jimmy Carter, who was visiting Pyongyang.

Not all Christian activists agree about the wisdom of sending North Koreans into North Korea to proselytize. There are conflicting views about how best to deliver the Christian message to North Koreans. The question, put simply, is this: Do you evangelize in North Korea, or do you evangelize only to those who have escaped?

Open Doors' Carl Moeller believes that carrying the Christian message into North Korea is necessary. Jesus told us to go into all the world and spread the Gospel, he said, quoting the Gospel of St. Mark. “That doesn't mean just the places where we can go with a legal visa.” He added: “Jesus said, I will build my church and the gates of hell will part. That's what's going on in North Korea.”

Tim Peters, the Seoul-based American missionary who has been working with North Korean refugees since 1996, takes a different view. “Yes, we need to send Bibles in, and I do that,” he said. “But ever since I started my work with the refugees, I very firmly have
been of the conviction that the way to help the North Koreans the most is to help them as they come out.” It is “common sense,” he said, “that we try to help people once they come out of the iron grip of the regime—that means the refugees.”

Like Moeller, Peters turned to Scripture to back up his opinion. He quoted the Gospel of St. Matthew:
When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another.
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In Peters's view, sending Christians into North Korea is at cross-purposes from what the Scripture says. He emphasized that there might be exceptions—cases where “the hand of God is at work and we shouldn't stand in the way.” But he is deeply troubled by the practice of sending new Christians back into North Korea to win converts to Christianity. “The Scripture says
flee
persecution,” he said. “It doesn't say run into it. It doesn't say put a little baby Christian on the tracks where an oncoming locomotive is going to run over him.”

The American evangelist Billy Graham visited Pyongyang in 1994 at the invitation of Kim Il Sung, who was then 81 years old and nearing the end of his life. Graham was traveling through Asia on one of the international crusades that have taken him to more than 180 countries and territories. His wife, Ruth Bell Graham, accompanied him. The trip to North Korea was something of a homecoming for Mrs. Graham, who was the daughter of Presbyterian medical missionaries in China and had gone to high school in Pyongyang in the 1930s. That was an era when Pyongyang was home to so many Christians that it was known as the Jerusalem of the East.

Kim Il Sung knew his audience. He regaled the Grahams with stories about attending church with his mother when he was a boy, and he told them about a Presbyterian minister who was an early influence on his life. In Hong Kong, where the Grahams flew from
Pyongyang, I spoke with the American evangelist. He speculated that “some of [Kim Il Sung's] early experiences may be influencing him now.”
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With age can come wisdom.

Pastor Graham also pointed to the explosion of interest in Christianity elsewhere in Asia and attributed the growing numbers of Christians there in part to the rapid changes that Asians are experiencing in their culture, economy, and politics. “There's a void,” he said. Asians are turning to Christianity to fill that spiritual hole. Why should North Koreans be any different?

Numbers are uncertain, but Billy Graham is right that Christianity appears to be winning converts in much of Asia. China has at least seventy million Christians and maybe as many as one hundred million. Pastor Graham noted that Christianity is growing rapidly in Thailand, a Buddhist country, as well as in predominantly Muslim Malaysia. There is a resurgence of Christianity in Vietnam, which has about five million Catholics now, compared with a million and a half in 1975. Fundamentalist Protestantism is catching on in the Philippines, which is overwhelmingly Catholic.

“Christianity does teach freedom,” Pastor Graham said. If Christianity it were to come to North Korea, that would be a good omen. “God through the Bible teaches freedom of choice in everything.”

The North Korean leader died a few months after the Grahams' visit, and he gave no sign that he had rejected his atheism or that his early exposure to Christianity had had any tempering effect on his regime's brutal policies toward Christians. The only worship allowed in North Korea remained the same: that of the Kim family.

But Billy Graham's essential point about Christianity—the connection to freedom—is the reason the North Korean regime fears it. Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe in part because the Christian message of freedom took new hold in places where it long had been repressed. In China, Christianity exploded after Beijing lifted some of its restrictions on religious freedom. The government now appears to be trying to reassert control over unregistered churches
as part of an overall crackdown on dissent. The examples of Eastern Europe and China would be well known to Kim Il Sung's son and successor, Kim Jong Il, who continued his father's antireligion policies. They would also be well known to current dictator Kim Jong Eun, who appears to be following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather.

Eom Myong-hui, the North Korean woman who became a pastor, says Christianity points the way to freedom. “In my view, Christianity is about the individual, about accepting responsibility,” she said.

That is anathema to Pyongyang.

THE JOURNEY OUT OF CHINA

T
here are many routes out of China on the new underground railroad, and every escape story is unique. Each carries its own logistical challenges, risks of arrest, and personal terrors. The train out of China sometimes is just that, an actual train that carries the North Korean runaway to a location near the border of a neighboring nation. The fugitives and their conductors move across the country by other means as well: express bus, private car, airplane, boat, and, more often than not, their own foot-power. The only way to evade the border controls of an adjacent country is usually to walk across an unpatrolled section of the Chinese frontier.

Whatever mode of transport North Koreans use to exit China, the journeys share common features. Behind every successful journey is a community of workers who make it happen. No North Korean can survive long in China without assistance, and no North Korean can get out of China on his own. Similarly, no conductor on the
new underground railroad, whether he is a humanitarian worker or a broker, can operate independently. He requires a network of people to support him and the North Koreans in his care. He needs locals to purchase the bus or train tickets; greeters to meet the travelers when they arrive in a new city; couriers to escort them to their overnight accommodation; linguists to translate from Korean to Chinese and vice versa; agents to procure fake travel documents; householders to provide meals and shelter. Sometimes these people are paid for their assistance and their silence. Other times the helpers work voluntarily, out of a sense of Christian charity or simple human kindness.