(CNSNews.com) - Communist persecution is causing North Koreans to flee in rising numbers to Communist China, says Dr. Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who spent 18 months inside North Korea.
"They are hiding in the woods. They do not have any shelter. They do not have any food or medicine. But it's much better than in North Korea," he said.
Vollertsen, who worked for German Emergency Doctors in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, received a friendship medal from the regime and says he was able to travel around the country in relative freedom until he realized humanitarian aid was being diverted to the military and started speaking out. He was expelled in December 2000.
Since then he has worked with and interviewed refugees and defectors on the China-North Korea border.
Vollertsen, in Washington, D.C. to discuss a possible congressional hearing on the subject, said North Korean defectors told him Christians are being tortured and killed for reading bibles. Some Christians, Vollertsen claimed, are forced to undergo biological warfare experiments.
Michael Horowitz of the Hudson Institute has been helping Vollertsen in his effort, lamenting "the almost complete lack of knowledge in the United States of the regime's lunatic character and why the president is precisely accurate to call it evil."
President Bush, who called the regime part of the "axis of evil," accused North Korea of starving its people and developing weapons of mass destruction.
Horowitz said North Korea is "worse than Sudan," where Christians also face persecution.
"The defectors at the Chinese-North Korea border say they have been imprisoned because they were reading pages of the Bible, preaching the Gospel or talking about God. They were tortured for reading the Bible. They were used for biological experiments because they believe in Christ. Some were killed. There were mass executions," Horowitz said.
He added that defectors are telling stories of babies being killed just because the mothers are Christian. "The North Koreans do not want another generation of Christians," Horowitz claimed.
Vollertsen charged that World Food Program (WFP) humanitarian and food aid to North Korea, much of it supplied by the U.S., was being diverted to the communist regime.
WFP spokesperson Abby Spring denied the charges, saying the U.N. agency is feeding one out of three people. It's "not perfect," she said, and the WFP wants more access to the country but "the alternative is to turn our back."
WFP personnel and other foreigners, Vollertsen said, are mostly restricted to Pyongyang, where they are given guided tours by the government.
"It's like a huge fake," Vollertsen said, adding that North Korean defectors laugh at the ability of foreigners to be deceived.
Vollertsen, who said he still has sources in North Korea, charged that there has been "no improvement" in the delivery of food aid and other assistance since he was expelled. "All the North Korean defectors told me the same - that it is so easy to deceive the World Food Program and Miss (Catherine) Bertini," the executive director of the WFP, he said.
When WFP personnel do travel to the countryside, Vollertsen alleged, the communists present some well-fed children and boxes of food to prove that the aid program is working. "But when the WFP cars are gone, all those North Korean defectors told me that the food is collected and then sent to the government storehouses." From there, Vollertsen added, the food is sent to the army or sold.
"The North Koreans are so sophisticated in this manipulation and propaganda," he said. "When they want you to think the food is going to the people, they will present you 100 children who are well-conditioned. When they want to get some more food, they will present you 100 skinny and starving children."
Vollertsen urged James T. Morris, the American who will take over as director of the WFP in April, to pressure North Korea for freedom of travel for aid workers, diplomats and journalists. "That's what the North Koreans are afraid of," he said.