Last week I presented
some
online materials to help your church. Here are more.
The Institute on
Religion and Democracy has a website page,
Human Rights in North Korea. It includes the harrowing testimony of
Sungwoon
Bang, imprisoned in a North Korean concentration camp after trying to
flee to China:
One day, workers at
the concentration centre were called to weed a field. We worked under close
supervision: we had to shout out our numbers so that we could not run away.
I hurriedly devoured ears of grain while weeding. When I saw frogs, I
devoured them too. To survive here, one had to lose all sense of decency
without concession. To eat anything, we would violate the rules at the
concentration centre, even if we would be beaten to death. We weren't
ashamed to do anything. That was the way to survive.
Soon Ok Lee, who also
escaped from North Korea, has a website
devoted to her story, including a description of life in the concentration
camps:
If the mother is
pregnant, according to the North Korean law that says that a criminal’s seed
must be scorched up to its third generation, they abort the baby. If somehow
the baby survives and is born, they strangle the baby by stepping on them in
front of its own mother. I also witnessed many human experiments. They said
it was pointless to test weapons and chemicals on animals because they were
created to target their enemies, other human beings. I also saw many
Christians in the camp. Because of their belief in God, and because they
sang hymns in the camps, they were stepped on until death. If they didn’t
deny God, they were often times burned to death from boiling hot liquid
metal.
Helping Hands Korea
is a relief organisation aimed at relieving the plight of the North Koreans.
Among its projects is the Ton-a-Month Club, aimed at raising funds to send a
ton of foodstuffs each month for people in the North.
Human Rights Watch
includes at its website a
major report on
North Korean refugees who have fled into China, with many testimonies:
In his first year at
the 14th administrative camp, a security officer shot dead the
driver of a coal trolley who stopped to pick chestnuts that had fallen from
trees onto the tracks. "I saw that dead driver still had a chestnut clutched
in his hand." Another time an officer caught a prisoner trying to chew an
oxtail whip for nourishment; he beat the prisoner and forced him to eat
intestinal worms picked out of a latrine. The man died two days later. He
concluded: "There are so many miserable stories. People pick undigested
beans out of the dung of oxen to eat. They compete to take the clothes off
of dead bodies to wear. It is not a human world."
There is much to pray
for.
June 14th,
2003