Interview with Chun Ki-Won, a Christian hero who smuggled over 300 North Korean defectors out of China in 5 years
By Willy Fautre
HRWF Int. (01.09.2003) - Website http://www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net - Near a subway station in Seoul, a church building with a sober meeting room on the first floor. A pulpit, a cross, a piano and a violin. Music hangs in the air. It is 8.30 pm. About twenty young North Korean refugees sing hymns and pray aloud in frenzied tones. Tonight, a group of eight North Korean refugees living underground in China will try to cross the Mongolian border. They are led in their prayers by Chun Ki-won (46). HRWF Int. has finally managed to find the most successful freedom smuggler in the Korean Peninsula, recognised as such by his colleagues.
HRWF Int.: Mr Chun Ki-Won, where does your commitment to North Korean refugees come from?
Chun Ki-Won: This dates back to only a few years ago. I worked my way up from waiting tables to managing a hotel in Seoul. For 17 years, I was flushed with success. I launched ventures that boomed and collapsed, including a golf equipment business in Tokyo and a Japanese restaurant in Seoul. These misadventures saddled me with USD 200,000 in debt. I sold my home and furnishings and sent my two children to live with friends. For months, I just lived on noodles. I envisaged suicide. I plumbed the depths of misery, but I gradually came to view my hard times as a sign from God that I was not meant to be a capitalist and I started studying to be a Presbyterian minister. Drawn to helping North Koreans and the idea of unifying the two Koreas, I established a mission which I named Durihana, which means two become one.
HRWF Int.: What does your mission do in China?
Chun Ki-Won: We buy and distribute Korean-language Bibles. We feed and clothe North Korean refugees. We teach them about the Christian faith, hold prayer and Bible meetings. We pay for safe houses and apartments where they may hide for months without going out and making any noise. We take them through Mongolia or through the jungles of Vietnam and on to sympathetic, non-Communist countries such as Thailand.
HRWF Int.: How many NK owe you their freedom?
Chun Ki-Won: In the last five years, I have managed to smuggle out about 320 North Koreans from China. Some of them are here in this prayer meeting you have just attended. The biggest group that I helped leave China comprised 21 North Koreans but the size is usually limited to 8 people; otherwise, the risks of being detected are too great.
HRWF Int.: On what grounds do you choose your refugees? Do you only help those who have become Christians in China?
Chun Ki-Won: Our mission runs a network of safe houses in northern China in which Christian missionaries hide them and teach them religion before smuggling them out of the country. They always cry in front of me before they leave and say they will live the rest of their lives for God but once they are in a free country, they often forget their promise. Not all of them fortunately, as you could see at tonights prayer meeting. So, seemingly convincing professions of faith do not influence my choice. My decision is part practical, part instinctive. Those with relatives in South Korea get preference. I consider the mix as well: those who are the most in danger, those who seem well-informed about the situation in North Korean labor camps, those who will do well in the South and want to work and not squander their money on gambling, and of course also those who have become committed Christians.
HRWF Int.: You risk your freedom every time you smuggle out North Korean defectors.
Chun Ki-Won: Once, a woman tried to use me as a drug-runner. Another time, one of them was almost arrested on a train because he was smoking in a non-smoking area. By acting so stupidly, he put all the others in danger. If I was not a Christian, I would sometimes kill some of them.
HRWF Int.: What is the difference between trafficking in human beings and your work?
Chun Ki-Won: The difference is that we are not motivated by money and do not ask any from refugees. We are humanitarian aid workers motivated by our Christian faith. We are freedom smugglers like the ones who smuggled Jews out of occupied France during WW II. We do the work which the UNHCR staff in Beijing should do and for which they are paid.
HRWF Int.: What is your worst memory with regard to your work?
Chun Ki-Won: The 220 days and nights that I spent in Chinese jails in 2002. I had left a group of twelve North Koreans near the Mongolian border with accurate instructions for the crossing. On their way, they entered a cave for cows made by nomads to take some rest because there was a lot of snow outside and it was freezing about 30 degrees below zero. They were caught by the Chinese police who had been informed by the nomads. During their interrogation, they revealed my name and I was arrested. From the moment I went through the door of the prison, I was forced to give up my life as a human being.
HRWF Int.: What is your most moving memory as a freedom smuggler?
Chun Ki-Won: I once saved an old woman who had become a Christian in 1990 while in North Korea. There was a terrifying famine at that time and she was starving, as all Koreans were. However, another lady helped her with some food from time to time. She wondered why she was doing that. Her guardian angel told her she was doing that because she believed in Jesus Christ. From that moment on, she decided to become a Christian. Every time, she was in dire need, she started praying Please, God, help me. She kept her faith until she left North Korea.
Interview taken in Seoul on July 8, 2003.
North Korea blasts US concerns about its religious freedom
AP (17.03.2003)/ HRWF Int. (19.03.2003) - Website: http://www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net - North Korea rejected U.S. concerns about religious freedom in the communist country Monday as a slur campaign aimed at isolating Pyongyang.
Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department labeled North Korea as a country of concern for religious persecution. Myanmar, China, Iran, Iraq and Sudan were also listed.
Urging Washington to "mind its own business," North Korea's foreign news outlet, KCNA, said the U.S. censure was meant to "stifle and isolate" the country.
It also tried to cite religious rights violations in the United States and accused Washington of oppressing Muslims in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The U.S. assertion is "nothing but sophism intended to invent a pretext for impairing the image of (North Korea's) system and stifle and isolate it at any cost," KCNA said.
U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the designation "countries of particular concern" is one of the tools the U.S. government uses to address religious persecution and pressure governments that are responsible for it.
Against all odds, faith flourishes quietly in North Korea
by Janet Chismar
Crosswalk.com (13.03.2003) / HRWF Int. (14.03.2003) - Website: http://www.hrwf.net - "North Korea used to be a Christian country before the Communists took over in 1945," according to Yoon Kwon Chae, whose father was one of the first Christian ministers in Korea. Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, was once called the "Jerusalem of Asia."
But now, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), the government in North Korea suppresses all independent religious activity. People who engage in public religious expression or other unauthorized religious activities continue to be arrested and imprisoned.
During the Korean War, reports Christian Solidarity International (CSI), over 300,000 Christians fled to South Korea. The others disappeared in camps. North Korea had, for decades, no officially recognized religious life.
In 1998, the government permitted the existence of three Christian churches in Pyongyang, if only for propaganda purposes. According to "official" statistics, there are approximately 10,000 Protestants, 4,000 Catholics and 10,000 Buddhists in North Korea.
It is clear, according to CSI, that the three churches mentioned only serve propaganda purposes. When, for example, visitors dropped by one Easter, they found the churches closed.
Christians pay a great price in everyday life. According to the U.S. State Department, North Korean officials have stratified society on the basis of family background and "perceived loyalty to the regime" into 51 specific categories. Religious adherents are by definition relegated to a lower category, receiving fewer privileges and opportunities (such as education and employment) than others. Persons in lower categories have reportedly been denied food aid.
Worse yet, reports USCIRF, people engaging in religious proselytizing or other "unauthorized activities," such as carrying Bibles in public or distributing religious literature, are arrested and imprisoned.
While the practice of imprisoning religious believers is apparently widespread, the U.S. State Department has been unable to fully document the number of religious detainees or prisoners. According to a press report, an estimated 6,000 Christians are incarcerated in "Prison No. 15" located in the northern part of the country. In April 1999, eyewitnesses testified before Congress that prisoners held on the basis of their religious beliefs were treated worse than other inmates.
International Christian Concern (ICC) also has received reports of the abuse of Christian prisoners in North Korea. One woman reported seeing Christians killed when molten steel was poured on them. She also stated that Christian prisoners were often not given clothes and were treated like animals.
According to ICC, an estimated 400 Christians were executed during 1999 alone. Most of them were killed by public firing squads after being convicted on trumped up criminal charges.
In 2000, ICC reported, Younghee Lee was executed by firing squad in the market place of Moonsan, in Hanmkyung North Province. She was accused of being a traitor to the Labor Party. Younghee had received the Lord after escaping to China in 1998 and returned to North Korea to preach the Gospel.
Faith Across Borders
Many North Koreans become Christians after fleeing to China, thanks to a number of missionaries and Christian groups operating near the border. The new believers later sneak back into Korea to preach the Gospel to their family and friends, according to a number of local sources. The punishment for this "crime" is prison and in some cases, even death.
ICC learned that the government issued an open warning to its citizens that these Christian missionaries must be "ferreted out" as the "tools of imperialism." It claimed that certain underground guerillas have been posing as missionaries.
As a Seoul-based North Korea watcher told Compass Direct, "It is really a control issue. The regime still expects total loyalty, and when people believe in God behind (the government's) back, it is regarded as the deepest form of disloyalty."
Compass confirms that a number of Christians have fled to China and would claim asylum on grounds of religious persecution, "but Chinese government officials rarely allow the refugees to appeal to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, despite a legal obligation to do so. Most are forcibly returned to North Korea."
A spokesperson for Open Doors with Brother Andrew told Crosswalk.com that the North Korean government has targeted "religious people" for extermination for three successive generations.
"Under this pressure type of pressure," said the Open Doors representative, "people are obviously not open about their faith. It is therefore very hard to know exactly how many North Korean Christians there are."
Many sources have told Open Doors that an underground Church does flourish in the northern areas but that it is strictly organized around family lines. ICC reports their sources estimate as many as 500,000 Christians live in North Korea.
Perhaps the reason for such growth lies in repression, as this report from CSI seems to indicate: "Having grown up in the merciless society of North Korea, many refugees feel drawn to the Christian message of love and empathy, previously entirely unknown to them. One refugee described his experience of the public execution of an entire family - 'They were tied to poles on the market square and shot to death. The children cried. I was so devastated that I fled to China and converted to Christianity.'"
"What will happen to the North Korean Christians?" asks Yoon Kwon Chae, the minister's son, who himsef is a missionary. "No one knows. However, these Christians will keep on meeting and will be increasing in number. Even from North Korean governmental reports, an increase of about 50 every year is apparent. The communistic government may be able to destroy freedom; they may be able to destroy democracy; but God they cannot destroy."
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