December 16, 2015 in North Korea the 60-year-old Canadian citizen of Korean origin, Lim Hyeon-soo, was sentenced to life in prison. He is a Protestant pastor at the Light Korean Presbyterian Church. This story has led to another (though substantially smaller than previous ones) surge of stories on the persecution of Christians. It was especially when on December 22, the Speaker of the DPRK Foreign Ministry passed a censure to Canada for doubts on the fairness of the sentence and for demands of releasing the Pastor, saying that the latter has received a fair sentence, and that laws of North Korea will severely punish those who are hostile towards the ideology and social system of the country or seeks to undermine them.
However, we are constantly monitoring the landmark trials of this kind, as there is more than just one story, on how an ordinary Protestant pastor conducted undermining activities against the DPRK, and even not just two or three. This story would not stand out of the pack, except for the Canadian citizenship of the preacher.
Let’s start from the beginning: Pastor Lim immigrated to Canada from South Korea in 1986. He is fluent in Korean and used to be under the cover of providing humanitarian aid and visited North Korea nearly a hundred times over 18 years.
At the beginning of 2015, the Pastor along with other representatives of the Church headed to the DPRK from China: this was to be a routine trip to the city of Rajin, where the Church supports a kindergarten, an orphanage and an elderly nursing home. January 31 Lim has got in touch for the last time, and then he disappeared a while.
This was the time when Pyongyang and most of the country were under a tough quarantine due to Ebola. It included even representatives of the diplomatic corps, though at the territory of Rason SEZ in northeastern North Korea the restrictions were less strict.
Sometime later, the Pastor was found and arrested in Pyongyang. After Lim was found outside the quarantine area, he was interrogated and a number of new facts surfaced.
First, Lim with a hidden camera has constantly filmed reality of North Korea and spread the videos on the Internet with the corresponding interpretations. In North Korea such actions are considered to be “undermining”, directed against the socialist system.
Besides this, he was engaged in blatant falsification of data that there is branching Christian resistance to the regime in North Korea. It turned out that he was passing off old Bibles, found among Koreans abroad, for the books, which were secretly passed from hand to hand in the DPRK, thereby creating the impression that there is a catacomb church there.
Second, he was “engaged in conspiratorial acts”, and not only castigated the North in his preaching activities and glorified himself at the Protestant symposiums by statements like “you need to destroy North Korea with God’s love.” There were anti-government slogans and quotations from the Bible printed on the bags with humanitarian aid from his church; and the Pastor himself was actively engaged in “broker activities” as a part of which residents of the DPRK, mainly migrant workers in China, were encouraged not to return back and were sent to South Korea or to the West for future use in propaganda activities against North Korea.
July 30, 2015 at a press conference in Pyongyang, in the presence of journalists and diplomats, Pastor Lim Hyeon-soo said that he arrived in the country to overthrow the existing regime there. There he has confirmed that he had illegally got to Pyongyang despite the quarantine and had been detained by the North Korean authorities. Evidence of his illegal activities was also presented there.
December 16 there was a court hearing held in the presence of Korean journalists and foreign journalists, accredited in the country (in particular, correspondents of TASS and Chinese Xinhua News Agency, as well as diplomats of the Embassy of Sweden, representing interests of the United States and Canada in the DPRK). At the hearing in a traditional pathetic spirit Lim was charged with “the biggest conspiracy plot to overthrow the state”, and broker activities were called “enticing and kidnapping of citizens of the DPRK”. It has been proven that he helped defectors from North Korea and sought to create clandestine religious cells on the territory of the country. Thus, as the public prosecutor emphasized, “he contributed to the hostile policy of the United States and the conservative South Korean regime that seek to isolate and stifle the DPRK.”
The accused Pastor has admitted that his humanitarian activities served as a disguise in order to “gain trust of the local people” and asked the court for leniency. The State Prosecutor demanded the death sentence, the lawyer asked to save the life of his client to make him “a witness of the prosperity of the DPRK and peaceful reunification of the North and the South.”
As a result, as it has already been said, there is a penal servitude for life. However, judging by the case with Kenneth Bae, Lim would not be imprisoned until the end of his life and most likely he is to be released and deported after a while.
The list of affected pastors is extended for another one, but the author would like to make some distinction between just the amateurs of hidden camera videos and those, who is engaged in deliberate undermining activities.
Thus, in April 2015 an American Korean, Suh Sandra, who was visiting the country for 20 years, was deported from North Korea on charges of conspiracy and propaganda under the cover of humanitarian activities. It was said that during the “humanitarian visits”, she was inter alia, carrying out the hidden videotaping with negative content, which then “was used in propaganda against the DPRK” according to the information spread by the North Korean channels. According to KCNA, Suh Sandra has pleaded the illegality of her actions and apologized, after which the competent authorities have only deported her.
From outside the picture seems similar, but the result is quite different. And this is an indirect indication that the undermining activities which Protestant sects lead against South Korea are not just fiction.
Konstantin Asmolov, Ph.D, Chief Research Fellow of the Center for Korean Studies, Institute of Far Eastern Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook“.
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