NORTH KOREA: Christians on the Korean peninsula have a long tradition of resisting dictatorship. Jasper Becker in Beijing reports on the fate of North Korea's large Christian community
Smuggled out on tiny scraps of folded paper, the news from North Korea's underground church brings both fear and hope to the Christians in China who are operating a covert and daring struggle to overthrow the North Korean regime.
"Whoever has a Bible in their hands is accused of being a spy - anything connected with the outside world can mean arrest or death," says one note.
"We almost starved to death but you sent food unexpectedly. We have unspeakable joy," reads another.
"We don't know how long this suffering will go on. We have joy in our hearts. Almighty God prepared paradise in heaven for us and this mortal life is short. We are diligently preaching the gospel. We tell people the food comes from Christians around the world. Our numbers are increasing every day," says a third, with dangerous frankness.
Some believe there are now 500,000 practising Christians in the North, praying secretly in caves or restricted to tiny cells so that, if ever tortured, they could not reveal the names of others. They are backed by a dedicated - some say reckless - minority of South Korean Christians determined to see Christianity unite the two Koreas.
"They follow the philosophy of the German Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer," said Prof Kim Chin-kyung, a South Korean-born American who founded the Yanbian University of Science and Technology in Jilin province, not far from the border with North Korea, and who frequently travels to Pyongyang.
Mr Bonhoeffer, executed for taking part in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler, had argued that it was morally right to actively fight evil.
One of the most daring groups calls itself Durihana. It was founded in 1999, with the mission to prepare "public opinion for a unified Korea under the reign of the God, based on the Christian spirit".
"In the 21st century, God may give our people a unified Korea as his greatest gift," its manifesto says. The group is determined to further an alternative strategy to the sunshine policy of South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, himself a Presbyterian elder.
Christians were at the forefront of the resistance against the Japanese occupation of Korea, when Pyongyang had so many churches it was known as the Jerusalem of Korea. During the 1950-53 Korean War, several million Christians fled to the South, where they took a leading role in fighting the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee.
Most churches in the South support Kim's sunshine policy and are actively seeking co-operation with Kim Jong-il and the official Korean Christian Federation in the North. It claims a membership of 12,000, with three functioning churches and a number of house churches.
"All ecumenical groups now support contact with the official church in North Korea," says Prof Park Kyung-seo, the human rights ambassador for the South Korean government, and a former secretary of the World Council of Churches. "I believe that after there is a peaceful settlement, it will be the right time to make converts, not now."
Those who disagree with that strategy are backed by international groups like Open Doors, founded 45 years ago by Brother Andrew, the Dutch-born author of God's Smuggler. It claims that since 1994, Christian missionaries have established 540 underground cells in the North and have smuggled in hundreds of thousands of Bibles.
Yet recently, missionaries in China have found it increasingly difficult to operate after Chinese police, often operating with the help of North Korean agents, broke up several networks.
Last year, Chinese police tracked down the Rev Chun Ki Won of South Korea while he was leading 12 refugees across the Sino-Mongolian border. He was jailed for seven months, mistreated but expelled after a trial and a 50,000 yuan (€6,000) fine.
In April they caught the Rev Choi Bong Il, who is still in jail. And in May, the Rev Joseph Choi, an American citizen, was caught along with 14 of the 38 children looked after in his Small Angel's House. Both are members of Durihana.
Many other missionaries have disappeared either in North Korea or in China, and their fate has depended on secret negotiations and the payment of large ransoms.
Others may have been murdered. Two South Korean missionaries, a married couple who ran a restaurant in the border town of Hunchun, were found in March 2001, murdered in their home. Dead alongside them were four North Korean refugees they were sheltering.
Previously, China had turned a blind eye both to hundreds of thousands who crossed unofficially into China and to the activities of missionaries and aid workers who set about helping them by distributing food or sheltering them in safe houses and orphanages.
But Beijing launched a hunt for such workers three years ago as the frigid relations with its North Korean neighbour warmed ahead of two head of state summits in 2000 and 2001.
An underground railroad enabled some refugees to reach South Korea by first travelling to third countries like Russia, Mongolia, Burma or Laos, where either the South Korean embassy or the United Nations High Commission for Refugees could help them.
According to official figures, thought to be deliberately underreported, more than 1,200 defected to South Korea last year, and China allowed more than 130 who had sneaked into foreign missions to leave for South Korea via the Philippines.
The Chinese offered rewards to informers, closed existing churches and issued local police with arrest quotas. Those caught helping the refugees were fined as much as 30,000 yuan (€3,600) and sometimes imprisoned.
"It is like something out of the Cultural Revolution," said a Western activist. "Police put up posters saying it was the duty of all Chinese people to arrest and denounce the refugees."
Some sources allege that China also permitted over 100 North Korean state security agents into China to help track the refugees, and that they often masquerade as refugees in order to infiltrate the networks.
According to a report published on Monday by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors without Borders), Beijing launched a new nationwide hunt in early December and by mid-January had deported 3,200 North Koreans as part of a "100-day campaign". And more than 1,300 are awaiting deportation in detention camps in Tumen and Longjing, both towns in Jilin province.
Once captured, many defectors are released after a few months of beatings and confessions, unless they are party officials or army officers, in which case they are considered guilty of treason. MSF gave the case of Mr Sohn In-Kuk, a 41- year-old major beaten to death last year by North Korean agents in a prison courtyard in Tumen town.
The crackdown was harsher in North Korea, where up to 100,000 Christians are said to be in jails.
"Kim Jong-il is now using the army to operate house-to-house searches for Christians. They look for any pieces of paper from outside," said one missionary.
Terrible stories filter through about the fate of those caught. One report said that in December 2000, a small group of Christians in Chongjin, on the north-east coast, were discovered at a prayer meeting. The 11 men were later beheaded at a public execution and the women and children sent to labour camps.
"There is much more surveillance. They are putting more people in jail, especially from the educated and ruling groups, to stop defections," the missionary said.
As the noose has tightened around the refugee network, many activists have resolved that the only option is to draw international attention to their plight.
A coalition of non-governmental organisations first helped a family of refugees to seek asylum inside the Beijing offices of the United Nations' High Commission for Refugees, a body which has stood by helplessly as China refused requests to process the North Koreans as asylum-seekers, saying they areeconomic migrants.
Then, last March, when a group of 25 refugees stormed into the Spanish embassy in Beijing, the campaign gained more publicity. A spate of similar incidents forced the Chinese to throw a cordon of barbed wire and extra guards around all diplomatic buildings.
China was alarmed by suggestions it should open its doors to a flood of refugees in order to precipitate North Korea's collapse, the very thing it wishes to prevent.
In the latest effort, NGOs tried to organise the flight of a party of boat-people, but China caught 60 North Koreans and three aid workers as they prepared to leave on two boats from Yantai in Shandong province.
The arrests prompted protests from Seoul and from the UN in Geneva and renewed determination to carry on with the exodus.