WORLD IGNORES WORST HUMAN RIGHTS OFFENSE

“Where is the international outcry from the international community for the most oppressed and persecuted people in the world who live in North Korea?” Riggs asks. “No nation is planning a military strike against the tyrannical rule of the North Korea.”

Riggs, who has worked for human rights in cooperation with several Christian groups, says the number of Christians jailed in North Korea is in the hundreds of thousands. He adds the number of deaths is enormous.

“There are reports of literally thousands who have been murdered in brutal ways. Yes, the regime murders its political prisoners, but Christians are targeted because killing a Christian there is considered more important,” Riggs says.

“Why no outcry? Why no liberators? Why is there apparently no interest?” Riggs demands. “The silence is incredible.”

International Christian Concern’s East Asia analyst Ryan Morgan says it’s not for lack of interest, but because it’s simply hard to keep up the interest.

“North Korea is such a ‘slow burning’ issue,” Morgan said. “It has been going on for a very long time, and after a while of reporting the same news about North Korea over and over again, the public loses interest.”

Morgan added that Christian persecution is difficult to make known because North Korea is almost impenetrable from the outside.

“It is almost impossible to get information about the underground church and persecution out of North Korea. Even if you do get information, you can’t publicize it without risking the lives of those who provided it,” Morgan said. “So between an issue that has gone on for decades with little change and the lack of substantial new information coming out of the country, it’s very difficult to keep up interest from the general public.”

In fact, Morgan believes the international community may have already resigned any hope on helping North Korean Christians.

“I think the international community has in many ways given up on the human rights travesty that is North Korea. In my mind what we see in North Korea is the slow-burning equivalent to the Holocaust or Stalin’s Collectivization schemes (which caused between 4 to 10 million people to starve to death),” Morgan said. “It is a human tragedy on a massive scale that the international community seems to have little interest in solving, or at least in solving it any time soon.”

But even politicians and the business community have given up on North Korea, Morgan insisted the human rights community has not.

“I would say that that all of us in the Christian human rights community are very aware and concerned about what’s happening,” Morgan said.

But China’s support for North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, Morgan explained, makes any change difficult.

(2013-09-22/wnd)