By Benjamin Bach
Among the protesters were 50 cyclists from Seoul who also wanted to emphasize this message. In total, 65 of us stood with banners, T-shirts, loudspeakers, plays, tracts, and a fierce conviction that what we did can affect the Chinese people and the future of North Korea.
Two North Korean refugees also participated. One of them, a very young man, told us his testimony:
I was the son of a whore in China and a traitor in North Korea
I was a miner in the northern Hamkyong province of North Korea. I will be 23 years old in July. Both my parents also worked in the mine. My name is Hahn Tae-song. In the winter of 1999, when I was only 14 years old, my family was very poor and I was so hungry that I would try to escape to China to find food and the opportunity to earn my daily bread. Because my parents lived close to the border, I managed to escape across the border many times. My last escape across the border was in 2006. The frequent traffic across the border led me to become a Christian, and now I am determined to work as a missionary for North Korean refugees.
Therefore, I have now ended up in South Korea after crossing Mongolia in July 2006, and I became a South Korean citizen in November 2006 after following the state refugee program.
The repeated arrests in China, deportations to North Korea, interrogations in North Korea and the many beatings in prison became commonplace. I was sent back to my school every time, where the teacher also beat me because I had fled to China. In China they called me a North Korean son of a whore. In North Korea, I was treated as a traitor because I had betrayed my country.
.......... In prison, I was often tied up and beaten with an electric baton - it felt like thousands of needles all over my body. Some prisoners died from this torture. I eventually got used to it, but my limbs swelled up and my skin peeled off after this treatment, which went on for hours. They wanted me to talk about underground Christians.
On one of my escape attempts to China, I was traveling with young girls and women. When we got to the river, it had overflowed its banks. We had to cross the river to get to the border. On the Chinese side, we were attacked by Chinese traffickers who raped the girls and women. We were just small children and could do nothing about it. Just thinking about this event can still make me almost faint.
Today I'm studying in Seoul - I'm going to be a Christian missionary to North Koreans.
Dear reader! You can make a huge difference for North Korea during these years. Pray! Cry out to God and pray for the blood of the persecuted to stop flowing. Pray for strength for the Christians who are fighting and making a difference. Pray for the imprisoned, the tortured - those who are to be executed today and whose only crime is that they confess Jesus as Lord. Pray for a free Korea.
