Source: Open Doors, December 13, 2017
In a new report on North Korean prison camps, one of the judges, a former child survivor from Auschwitz, said the conditions were as bad—or even worse—than what he witnessed in the Nazi concentration camps.
The report shared by the IBA (International Bar Association) War Committee offers chilling details from personal testimonies, video, transcripts, and scholarly works about the state of North Korea’s prison camps. We share these facts to help you understand the severe mistreatment, injustice, and abuse many of our brothers and sisters in Christ are subjected to daily within North Korea’s infamous prison camp system.
- There are an estimated 80,000-130,000 political prisoners held in North Korea’s prison camps.
- Inside the camps, prisoners are often “tortured and killed on account of their religious affiliation, with officials instructed ‘to wipe out the seed of [Christian] reactionaries.’”
- In one account, guards killed a prisoner’s newborn baby by feeding it to the guard dogs.
- The report also explains the fact that routine public executions are carried out in front of both children and adults, “designed to subdue the prison population.” In another case, the prison guards executed starving prisoners “found digging for edible plants on a mountainside.”
- There were many more cases reported of inhumane treatment, deliberate starvation, cruelty, abuse, rape, forced abortions, and murder. Some of the details in the report are too graphic to share.
As hard as it is to read—or even imagine—this is a reality. We can’t afford to look away from this—or to let our Christian family in North Korea feel isolated and alone.
» full story inluddes links to download the report or an executive summary.
» To learn about one ministry serving North Korean defectors, see English Opens Doors for North Koreans (One Mission Society).