Religious Freedom in North Korea

A Forum 18 News article reports that a Russian Orthodox church is being built in Pyongyang:

Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, has two Protestant and one Catholic church, which are suspected of being "show churches" for display to foreigners, so it remains unclear whether any North Koreans will be able to or will dare to regularly attend an Orthodox church under construction. The building is funded by the North Korean state, and Forum 18 News Service has learnt that it is "65 per cent finished". By the early 1900's, about 10,000 Koreans had converted to Orthodoxy due to Russian missionaries in the now divided Korean peninsula. Dmitry Petrovsky, of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for External Church Relations, expressed the hope to Forum 18 that links with this past missionary activity remain, as is the case with Orthodox churches in South Korea. Four North Koreans are studying at the Moscow Theological Seminary, and Petrovsky remarked to Forum 18 that they are displaying "zeal and a genuine interest in Orthodoxy".

This is a country where an estimated one in 50 is a government informer, and parents are said to be too afraid to pass on their faith to their children.

Forum 18 derives its name from Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (freedom of worship).

An earlier Forum 18 overview of religious freedom in the Hermit Kingdom concluded that any increase in religious activity probably resulted from returning defectors sharing a faith newly acquired abroad, and that this poses a threat to the regime:

the regime's concern that South Korean Christian groups in China pose a security threat to North Korea is not entirely illegitimate. For many years, South Korean organisations and individuals who wish to conduct humanitarian activities in North Korea or along the Chinese border with the DPRK must receive the approval of the South Korean Ministry of Unification. South Korean government approval of their activities was also conditioned upon their willingness to gather "intelligence" on its behalf.

One certain thing in all this murk is that the main religion in North Korea is worship of Kim Il Sung, the Eternal Leader.

Moon and earth

Fashion conscious readers may pity me for having a gizmo up there top right that is so last year.

In the far east, moon phases are still important. The moon governs the calendar.

In Korea, there is a holiday for the full moon of the 8th month: it is Chuseok, when everyone rushes home to be back with their family and honour their ancestors. People tend graves, and make offerings. Then there's food and games. It's the major holiday of the Korean calendar.

If you're confused by the reference to August in that article, so am I. The Korean Year started later, but it's more complicated than that. Here's a simple explanation of the Korean calendar. I love the names of the solar terms:
Ipchun (Spring Begins)
Usu (Rain Water)
Kyongchip (Startled Hibernators)
Chunbun (Vernal Equinox)
Chongmyong (Clear and Bright)
Kogu (Grain Rain)
Ipha (Summer Begins)
Soman (Filling Out)
Mangjong (Grain in the Ear)
Haji (Midsummer)
Soso (Lesser Heat)
Taeso (Great Heat)
Ipchu (Fall Begins)
Choso (Heat Ceases)
Paengno (White Dew)
Chubun (Autumnal Equinox)
Hallo (Cold Dew)
Sanggang (Frost Descends)
Iptong (Winter Begins)
Sosol (Lesser Snow)
Taesol (Great Snow)
Tongji (Midwinter)
Sohan (Lesser Cold)
Taehan (Great Cold)
Each lasts a fortnight. The dates of these vary from year to year.

Re-reading this prior to posting, it strikes me how neutral I'm trying to be. Chuseok is about harvest and ancestors. It is all so alien. I don't know where any of my grandparents is buried. One grandfather lies somewhere in Australia, another somewhere in the West Midlands. I know where my grandmothers died, but not where they are buried. I could find out, though my parents might think it odd. As children, we were kept away from funerals, and cemeteries were seen as gloomy, sentimental places. It may have had something to do with our peripatetic life. Graves were another thing to let go of, along with homes and friends we had to leave. The grandmother I never knew is most vivid to me in the stories my father and aunt told me. Vivid and deeply unreliable - a story-teller herself, who if believed would link me back to real people and places that may not belong at all.

I can see some virtues in solid ground. I would pull the weeds from her grave, if I knew where it was, and I would feel sentimental, superstitious even, for doing so. As for my own - I will be cremated and scattered.

La la la

I'd heard reports of ambitious Korean parents arranging for their children's tongues to be snipped to enable them to pronounce English, but doubted that it could be a widespread practice. Perhaps it isn't. Here's a first hand account by the impeccably fluent Woojay, who suffered this mutilation in 4th grade. It's not the only mutilation his doting parents visited upon him.
Not for the faint-hearted or prudish.

Beyond satire

I was intrigued to discover, via the advert on my Gmail sidebar, the official page of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, available in 17 languages (including Esperanto).

I suspected it might be a spoof, like Kim Jong-il’s blog, also advertised in my Gmail sidebar. (Yes, we all know the Dear Leader is an internet addict.)

But no. It’s real. Or, at least, it’s alternatively real. Here's a song I bet you don't hear much in Seoul.

In easily navigable little chunks of information, it depicts a land of completely liberated people, wearing elegant clothes and accessories, eating delicious exotic food, and playing tug o’war or singing folk songs after a hard day’s work with explosives:

The peasant’s music folk games like the ‘kangangsuale’ were also very favourites in Korea. This kind of dancing games where usually made during the rest times in the harvesting or when returning home after work. Also during collective work like bridge construction or excavation.

It might only be accident that casts that passage in the past tense. They obviously didn’t ask Charles Jenkins to run an eye over the English. I’ve endeavoured to copy accurately in transcribing sections here. More web-savvy readers than me will have something to say about the reasons for the jpg page construction.

The site aims to give an overview of North Korean culture, history, geography and politics. For example we are told about traditional dwellings, by comparison with which

The new and modern buildings of today have an average surface of 150 square meters fully equipped with furniture, heaters, fridge, colour TV, etc. and they’re provided totally free from the government to each family in the country, so in North Korea there’s not just a single person poor or homeless.

Certainly I've heard that the DPRK houses up to 200,000 political dissidents in gulags, but I doubt somehow that they have colour television.

And in a country where an estimated 2 million people have starved to death since the mid-nineties, the section under Drinks is from another world:

The liquors are extracted from the cereals like the ‘Kamjongro’ (high alcoholic grade, it has red colour and it’s sweet and slightly hot, distilled from honey) or the ‘jukrioko’ (made from giant bamboo and ginger).

In the soft drinks you can find the ‘Sujongkua’ (made from cinnamon, ginger and pears, peach or other fruits) Since long time ago this one is a traditional New Year drink. ‘Juache’ is another drink made from ‘Schizandra water’ where sugared fruits are mixed with pine nuts and ice cubes, perfect for summer time.

With the high development of the nutritional industry, today a great variety of the traditional food can be produced in big amounts.

Don’t get me started on the sections on history and politics.

Today The DPRK is a genuine worker’s state where all the people are completely liberated from the exploitation and oppression. The workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals are the real owners of the power and defend their interests.

For just 12 Euros inclusive of handling and shipping, I could buy a Kimjongilia badge!

Do read the whole thing if you've the stomach for it. There are more nauseating distortions. It's interesting, though, to see things from another perspective. Like The Wall, for instance.

The Wall

Only a few people in the world know that Korea is divided by a big concrete wall in the Parallel 38 that was built by the United States of America when the Korean War finished. This wall is hundreds of times bigger than the one that existed in Germany

and allegedly divides not only the nation but cuts across rivers, mountains, and paths of migrating animals.

Never heard of it? Digging around online produced a host of references, split predictably into two camps. The official South Korean line is that the wall is imaginary. The US say it’s only a series of tank barriers, but I’m not sure how long your defences against tanks can be before they are a wall. The "combined length of 44.6 km" acknowledged by Yonhap News (the ROK news agency) is quite a barrier, even if it doesn't run the full 240 km from coast to coast. The North Koreans claim that the wall is camouflaged from the South and therefore invisible.

Ever have the feeling that you don't know what to believe?

By the way, I'd be interested to know if the DPRK site is easily accessible from South Korea.

More western propaganda about North Korea here:
BBC North Korea: On the Face of it (18 September 2004)
BBC Country Profile: North Korea
Guardian Special Report
NKZone (academic blogzone)

comments

Haloscan has visited on me the ultimate indignity of denying me access to my own comments box. Something to do with my security settings, but I think it's madness to disable my firewall, as suggested, for even a second.

So I have restored blogger comments. Not that I'm expecting any comments anyway.

Blogging on

A nice plug for OhmyNews in this morning's Guardian in an article on blogging as a corrective to established media.

I googled "rathergate" just now and it turned in 13,300 results.

I am not and never will be a news blogger, but I'm all for challenging accepted sources of information.

Having been on hiatus for a while (several posts lying there in draft form may never see the light of day) I hope to be blogging again shortly.