Seoul, South 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 supressed.
According to the report, economic crimes in particular continue to be punished through public executions.
Among those executed were members of a family accused of stealing eight cows, an invaluable resource in the famine-stricken North. The report said unwritten rules have been applied stipulating that people who steal more than five cows are subject to public execution.
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. The number of public executions, however, has apparently been declining since North Korean leader Kim Jong-il complained about "too many gunshot sounds." In March 2003, the government announced that it would refrain from executing criminals in public, the report said.
"In contrast to pressure from the United States, Pyongyang does not completely ignore pressure from the United Nations and Europe," Kim Soo-am, researcher at the research institute's North Korean Human Rights Center, said. "Whether it actually has an impact on the people or not is a different matter, but the change, for now, seems positive."
The Korea Institute of National Unification is a state-run think-tank, and the report is scathing on Pyongyang's rights violations despite Seoul's reluctance to address the issue publicly. South Korea has abstained from voting on a UN resolution condemning North Korea's human rights situation.