Genocide Used To Destroy Spread Of Christianity In North Korea

While it is certain that North Korea has committed a political and ideological genocide, which has claimed millions of innocent lives, it is often overlooked that the North Korean regime has also in every aspect violated the UN Genocide Convention, to which it is a state party.

Raphael Lemkin's Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was enacted in the wake of the Holocaust and the unprecedented devastation of World War-II. This was the first human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations, and was intended to serve as a legal infrastructure which, if followed faithfully, would not only assist in preventing genocide from happening again, but also facilitate intervention in the event of a genocide which is underway.

Article 2 of the 1948 Convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."


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Before the division of Korea, the north was considered to be the center of Christianity in East Asia with millions of believers; 25 to 30 percent of the population in Pyongyang was Christian. Today, North Korea is internationally recognized as the worst violator of religious freedom in the world and true religious belief is not tolerated. Christians are either publicly executed or forcibly transferred to concentration camps where they are systematically starved, tortured and worked to death along with their entire families to three generations, including non-religious relatives and children. The cruelty and barbarity occurring in these camps has no parallel in the world today. In 2002, the National Association of Evangelicals stated that North Korea is "more brutal, more deliberate, more implacable, and more purely genocidal" than any other nation in the world.


Every method which constitutes genocide as outlined in the Convention is being utilized by the regime to destroy its indigenous religious population through the widespread practice of public executions, systematic use of torture, deliberate deprivation of food and medicine in concentration camps, persecution of the children of religious believers, and the forcible transfer and imprisonment of children(Source).