For the 13^th time the annual World Watch List published each January by Open Doors, the organisation that campaigns for persecuted Christians, has North Korea at its head. It is once again judged to be the most dangerous country in the world to be a Christian.

Given the horrific images and stories we have become used to from Nigeria and the appalling events unfolding in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, that’s quite a claim. However, to anyone involved in monitoring human rights, it is uncontroversial. North Korea is not just the worst place in the world to be a Christian, it is arguably the worst country in the world to live, full stop.

This is in spite of the fact that to the uninitiated, North Korea can seem like a bit of a joke. It hits the headlines for the most bizarre of reasons. Last year, for instance, male university students were ordered to get their hair cut in the style of the “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong Un. (It is a sort of extreme pudding-basin cut, unflattering on anyone.) There were, quite rightly, howls of derision – but rather less reflection on what the decree said about the leader’s personality cult and his ability to impose it on an entire nation.

More recently, North Korea has been accused of being behind the hacking of Sony Pictures emails in retaliation for The Interview, a spoof film about Kim Jong Un’s fictional assassination. We all enjoyed the candid emails about Angelina Jolie, but it demonstrates the country’s fearsome reach in cyber-warfare.

It is also a nuclear power with conventional forces which include an army that is the largest military organisation on earth. It has 9,495,000 active, reserve, and paramilitary personnel, representing 40 per cent of the entire population.

This wholesale militarisation of the country has been achieved through levels of state control and oppression which are unparalleled anywhere else. According to Amnesty International, “North Korea is in a category of its own when it comes to human rights violations. It is a totalitarian state where tens of thousands of people are enslaved and tortured. All forms of freedom of expression are repressed and anyone attempting to assert their rights is crushed. In North Korea, where failing to show sufficient reverence for the country’s leaders is a serious offence, no one is safe from arrest and imprisonment.”

The control exercised by the state has ensured the subjection of its people in the face of appalling hardships. A famine from 1994-98 killed hundreds of thousands of people: accurate data is impossible to come by and some estimates are as high as 3,500,000 out of a population of 22 million, though recent research suggests the range may be between 500,000 and 600,000.

A drought last year brought fresh suffering, with the United Nations estimating that around two-thirds of the population suffer chronic food shortages. Generations of North Koreans are growing up malnourished, stunted and prone to diseases for which a healthcare system which is non-existent outside the main cities is unable to provide remedies. Punitive sanctions imposed by most of the world out of justifiable outrage at the excesses of the regime have failed to moderate the behaviour of its leaders and arguably contributed to the suffering of ordinary North Koreans, while they are circumvented by China, which is terrified of the instability that might result from the collapse of its armed and dangerous neighbour.

TWISTED IDEOLOGY

But what lies behind the regime’s behaviour, and why does it target Christians?

Central to understanding the paranoia and secrecy of North Korea are the concepts of ‘Juche’, developed by the country’s founding father Kim Il Sung, and the related ‘Kimisungism’ named after him. Juche’s three key principles are political independence, economic self-sufficiency and self-reliance in defence. However, in practice these have morphed into an ideology of obsessive secrecy, ultra-nationalism and an extraordinary cult of personality focused on the country’s leader – Kim Il Sung and his successors. Such is the extent of this that a leader’s death, for instance, can be the focus of intense emotion – and anyone who doesn’t feel it or can’t fake it is in trouble.

In her book Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick wrote, referring to Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994: “The histrionics of grief took on a competitive quality. Who could weep the loudest?”

She noted that one young student in Pyongyang felt nothing as all around him were wailing. However: “His entire future depended on his ability to cry. Not just his career and his membership in the Workers’ Party, his very survival was at stake. It was a matter of life and death.”

She wrote that he was saved by holding his eyelids open and his eyeballs exposed until they burned and began to tear up. Once they started, he began sobbing like everyone else.

Absolutely nothing can be allowed to challenge this cult – and certainly not Christianity, seen both as a foreign ideology and as a threat to the regime’s absolutism. Total social control has been achieved through the ‘Songbun’ system in which people are divided into three main classes: the loyal, the wavering and the hostile. These are further divided into 51 subclasses. Christians are part of the ‘hostile’ class, with Protestant Christians being ranked at 37 and Catholic Christians at 39 – a long way down the pecking order.

Open Doors estimates that there are around 300,000 Christians in the country, though hard evidence is difficult to come by because of the regime’s obsessive secrecy and total control of information – all newspapers are censored and only a tiny minority of trusted individuals have access to the internet. Believers meet largely in secret. The few churches allowed to operate are fronts put on for foreigners to able to demonstrate North Korea’s ‘freedoms’ – though bizarrely, in 1992, Billy Graham visited the country at the invitation of the ‘Eternal President’ Kim Il-Sung and was allowed to give a speech in Pyongyang. He made a second trip in 1994.

PRISON CAMPS

Evangelism is absolutely prohibited and carried out at the risk of death or imprisonment in one of the country’s fearsome labour camps. Last year it was reported in the South Korean press that 33 North Korean Christians faced execution after being charged with attempting to overthrow the regime – they had worked with South Korean Baptist missionary Kim Jung Wook and received money to set up 500 underground churches. While the story has been questioned, it is perfectly credible. And would-be Christian missionaries from outside the country such as Kenneth Bae and Jeffrey Fowle have found to their cost that North Korea does not tolerate religious interference.

Amnesty quotes one former inmate, Kim Young, who spent nine years in one of the prison camps. “It is a place that would make your hair stand on end,” she said. “From sunrise to sunset, you work. You get up at 3.30 to report for work at 4.30.” She also recollects pregnancy tests, forced abortions and deliberately induced miscarriages: “Pregnant women get sent to labour camps to carry loads up and down the hills which causes miscarriages.”

A former prison official says: “You would need to walk 12-14 miles to get to the field where you plough. You would be expected to walk the distance and then plough the field. You would have to stay awake until midnight as well. There are meetings going until midnight.”

Another woman Jihun Park, recalls: “Four women had to plough with an oxcart, two in front and two at the back, carrying a ton of soil in the cart. We couldn’t do this at a walking pace either, we had to run.”

According to a former military captain. “Starvation is the biggest problem. I saw piles of bodies who have died from starvation in public places.”

Torture, executions – including the execution of children, especially after they have tried to run away – and sexual abuse are common. A former prison guard says: “After a night of ‘servicing’ the officials, the women had to die because the secret could not get out. This happens at most of the political prison camps.

A peculiar refinement of the system is the “guilt by association” principle, in which several generations of a family in which one person has transgressed are executed or sent to labour camps as well – ensuring that every member of a family is made responsible for keeping the others in line. (Current president Kim Jong Un is reported to have ordered the execution both of his uncle and his uncle’s family in a purge last year.)

Around 100,000 people are thought to be held in these conditions.

CHRISTIAN WITNESS

Yet even so, the North Korean Church survives – even in the labour camps themselves. Open Doors tells the story of a woman called Chun, who was sent to one of North Korea’s horrific labour camps after she tried to escape to China as punishment for ‘defecting’ (refugees who do reach China are often sent back). “I was beaten and tortured so badly that I could barely stand up,” she says. However, in her dirty, overcrowded prison cell, she says: “There was one lady who was really kind to me. When I was in so much pain she invited me to lay my head in her lap. She stroked my hair.

“This lady came to faith when she was in China. She was put behind bars, just like me. It did not stop her from doing Christ’s work.” Some time later Chun herself became a believer. She says: “Despite all my suffering I love God with my whole heart. I am so grateful for Him.”

Like many of the world’s darkest places in the late 20^th and 21^st century, North Korea was a product of the rivalry between the USSR and the West. The mind of its founder Kim Il Sung was formed by the Marxism of his Soviet and Chinese mentors. However, the division of the Korean peninsula after the Korean War (1950-53) has allowed the North to calcify in a brutally oppressive oppression in which the minds, bodies and spirits of its citizens have been warped by a paranoid dictatorship which maintains its control through terror and indoctrination, uniting its people through fear of a common – imaginary – enemy.

Many of the old Cold War conflicts have been resolved. North Korea, where human suffering has nowhere been as great for so long, has not – and humanly speaking, there seems very little chance of change any time soon. UN Security Council resolutions, sanctions and even mass starvation have failed to shift the regime one iota.

It is always easier to pray for people when we know their stories and their faces. One of the problems faced by North Korean Christians is that they are usually anonymous. They have no internet; there are no pictures; there are no names. It is easier to concentrate on causes that are more media-friendly. But Jesus cared for the faceless and voiceless, too. In a world awash with information, the hidden horrors of North Korea need our prayers more than ever.

Source: Christian Today

An Iraqi Christian who has been on the run from Islamic State (IS) since June says that she and the hundreds of other refugees in Ankawa, Kurdistan, are not angry at God.

Speaking to Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, Suheila, an elderly Christian woman forced by IS to flee Mosul, said: “We’ve lost everything. The worst thing is that we don’t know when or whether we will be able to return to our homeland.

“But none of us is angry at God. Fortunately we are all still alive.”

Last summer Suheila had to run for her life, along with tens of thousands of other Christians. She first sought shelter in Qaraqosh, but in August was forced to flee again when IS advanced. Now she lives in a sports club in Ankawa. “This is a really big improvement,” she says, “I am grateful for it. But in general, of course, this is no life.”

When Suheila and the other refugees arrived in Ankawa, a suburb of the Kurdish capital Erbil, four months ago, there was nowhere for them to go. Many of them had to sleep on the pavement and under bushes. The local church has been doing what it can to help them.

Father Daniel Alkhari, a young Chaldean priest who works in a refugee camp in Ankawa where more than 800 Christians are living, spoke to Aid to the Church in Need about their refugee crisis. “When the people arrived here they were totally traumatised,” he said. “It wasn’t easy for the people to cope with the fact that they suddenly had nothing and had to live in tents.

“The children in particular were suffering under the situation,” Father Daniel continued. “They saw their mothers crying and their fathers yelling. Then we began to structure the everyday routine to give the children something different to think about.”

The first school for Christian refugee children in Ankawa welcomed students to its classes in December, and seven other schools spread throughout Iraqi Kurdistan are due to open soon. This will enable more than 7,000 children to start going to school again.

Suheila’s words to a group of European visitors in Ankawa were, “Thank you, thank you, thank you. May God make things easy for you in your lives.”

Source: Christian Today

The British nurse being treated for Ebola in London is no longer in a critical condition, the hospital has confirmed.

In a statement released today, the Royal Free Hospital says it is “pleased to announce that Pauline Cafferkey is showing signs of improvement and is no longer critically ill. She remains in isolation as she receives specialist care for the Ebola virus.”

Cafferkey was diagnosed with Ebola on December 29 after returning to Britain from Sierra Leone, where she had been working for the charity Save the Children at a treatment centre outside the capital, Freetown.

Cafferkey is the first person to have been diagnosed with Ebola on British soil.

The Royal Free, Britain’s main centre for Ebola cases, successfully treated British aid worker William Pooley with the experimental drug ZMapp after he was flown back to Britain in August.

Ebola is transmitted through bodily fluids, and the hospital said it was treating Cafferkey inside a specially designed tent around her bed with controlled ventilation to reduce the risk of further infections.

In late December, when Cafferkey first arrived in hospital, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby showed his appreciation for those working to combat the virus, writing: “we owe them thanks and respect”, and asked for continued prayers.

The West African Ebola outbreak was first identified in Guinea’s remote southeast in early 2014. Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia have borne the brunt of the 20,000 infections and nearly 8,000 dead.

In December Sierra Leone’s government announced it was banning public celebrations over Christmas and New Year to try and prevent its spread.

Source: Christian Today

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday that he and his Iranian counterpart would seek at their meeting on Wednesday to lay the ground for negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program to make greater progress.

Kerry meets Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Geneva in a bid to revive the search for an elusive nuclear accord after negotiators failed for the second time in November to meet a self-imposed deadline.

“The meeting is calculated to take stock, number one, and to provide direction to our teams, number two, and to hopefully be able to accelerate the process to make greater progress,” Kerry told reporters on a visit to India.

Zarif has also struck a conciliatory tone ahead of the new push to end the 12-year-old dispute over Iran’s nuclear program, which Tehran insists is peaceful. The West fears it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

The Kerry-Zarif meeting precedes lower-level bilateral talks between Iran and members of six major powers the next day, and a collective discussion among the entire group on Jan. 18.

In 2013, the United States, France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China, struck a preliminary agreement with Iran for the suspension of nuclear work in return for easing some economic sanctions.

After missing the November deadline for a comprehensive agreement, the preliminary accord was extended for another seven months.

Iranian and Western officials have said differences remain over Tehran’s uranium enrichment capacity, how fast economic sanctions should be lifted and other key issues.

“We’re at a juncture where most of the issues are now getting fleshed out and understood and I think it’s important for him and for me to take stock,” Kerry said of his meeting with Zarif on Wednesday.

Source: Reuters

Indonesian navy divers retrieved the black box flight data recorder from the wreck of an AirAsia passenger jet on Monday, a major step towards unraveling the cause of the crash that killed all 162 people on board.

But there was confusion about what happened in the final moments of Flight QZ8501, which crashed off the Indonesian coast on Dec. 28, with one official saying the plane probably exploded before hitting the water and another disputing that theory.

The Airbus A320-200 airliner lost contact with air traffic control in bad weather less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Indonesia’s second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore.

“At 7:11, we succeeded in lifting the part of the black box known as the flight data recorder,” Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, head of the National Search and Rescue Agency, told reporters at a news conference.

The second so-called black box, containing the cockpit voice recorder, is located about 20 meters away from where the flight data recorder was found, but divers have not yet been able to get to it.

“(The cockpit voice recorder) seems to be under a wing, which is quite heavy,” said Supriyadi, operations coordinator for the search and rescue agency. “So we will use air bags to lift it. This will be done tomorrow.”

The black boxes contain a wealth of data that will be crucial for investigators piecing together the sequence of events that led to the airliner plunging into the sea.

Supriyadi said the wreckage indicated that the plane likely “experienced an explosion” before hitting the water due to a significant change in air pressure.

He said the left side of the plane seemed to have disintegrated, pointing to a change in pressure that could have caused an explosion.

“NO DATA” TO SUPPORT THEORY

Supporting this possibility, he added, was the fact that fishermen in the area had reported hearing an explosion and saw smoke above the water.

But another official disputed the likelihood of a blast.

“There is no data to support that kind of theory,” said Santoso Sayogo, an investigator at the National Transportation Safety Committee.

The flight data recorder was brought by helicopter to Pangkalan Bun, the southern Borneo town that has been the base for the search effort, and then flown to Jakarta for analysis.

The black box looked to be in good condition, said Tatang Kurniadi, the head of the transport safety committee.

Investigators may need up to a month to get a complete reading of the data.

“The download is easy, probably one day. But the reading is more difficult … could take two weeks to one month,” the NTSC’s head investigator, Mardjono Siswosuwarno, said.

Over the weekend, three vessels detected “pings” that were believed to be from the black boxes, but strong winds, powerful currents and high waves hampered search efforts.

Dozens of Indonesian navy divers took advantage of calmer weather on Monday to retrieve the flight recorder and search for the fuselage of the Airbus.

Forty-eight bodies have been retrieved from the Java Sea and brought to Surabaya for identification. Searchers believe more bodies will be found in the plane’s fuselage.

Relatives of the victims have urged authorities to make finding the remains of their loved ones the priority.

“I told our soldiers that the search isn’t over yet,” Armed Forces chief General Moeldoko told reporters. “I am sure the remaining victims are in the body of the plane. So we need to find those.”

Indonesia AirAsia, 49 percent owned by the Malaysia-based AirAsia budget group, has come under pressure from authorities in Jakarta since the crash.

The transport ministry has suspended the carrier’s Surabaya-Singapore licence for flying on a Sunday, for which it did not have permission. However, the ministry has said this had no bearing on the crash.

President Joko Widodo said the disaster exposed widespread problems in the management of air travel in Indonesia.

Source: Reuters