Suffering on the Day of the Sun in North Korea

Suffering on the Day of the Sun in North Korea


15 APRIL 2021, THE TABLET
Suffering on the Day of the Sun in North Korea
by Scarlett Sherriff

The Kimilsungia Flower Festival, associated with the Day of the Sun marking the birthday of Kim Il Sung, in Pyongyang.
Yevgeny Agoshkov/TASS


The late Kim-Il Sung, the founder of North Korea, is remembered every year on his birthday, which was today, April 15, in 1915. There are mass displays of flowers, people visit memorials to pay their respects and there are often enormous military parades. It’s known as “The Day of the Sun”, and in a country where religion is outlawed and ruthlessly persecuted, Kim Il-Sung is revered like a god.

This year, many North Koreans will once again spend the day paying their respects to the leader, but others will live it imprisoned for disobeying the regime or just following a Christian faith.


Timothy Cho defected from North Korea at the age of 17, but he remembers his childhood; especially 8 July 1994, the day Kim Il-Sung died: “My friends were crying, not sleeping, not eating. Many of us thought he was like our grandfather.”

Cho, now a devout Christian, likens the principles that guide the behaviour of North Koreans to the Ten Commandments. The system is known as “Ten Principles for the Establishment of a Monolithic Ideological System”, and includes rules such as: “We must make absolute the authority of the Great Leader comrade Kim-Il Sung.”


Cho’s parents, both school teachers, left before he did, and in North Korea when your parents defect you are left abandoned: “When your father betrays the country, living in North Korea, you get a kind of black stamp. When you have that, you have no future. You [belong] to the most discriminated group [for] food, healthcare, job promotions.”


Join our distinguished panel this evening to discuss the plight of persecuted Christians around the world and what we can do to give them hope in the 21st Century.

There are hundreds of thousands of escapees; many of them – feeling they have no other option – leave without their children. Like Cho, the left behind young people often end up homeless: “They just end up living on the streets. Even if they die, no one comes to pay their respects or cry.”

Although Cho now works with the charity Open Doors that helps persecuted Christians across the world, in North Korea he was taught that religion was the enemy. The propaganda of the regime dictates: “Religion is being used as a tool to destroy our society,” said Cho. People are told instead that they must “follow Kim”.


The irony is that Christianity was once popular in North Korea. The first Catholic missionaries arrived in the late eighteenth century and, though you wouldn’t know it now, before 1948 Pyongyang was known as the Jerusalem of the East. However, the establishment of the “communist” regime meant that religion was shunned, and much of the community had to flee south of the border.

Anti-religious conditioning starts early, Cho told The Tablet: “My first contact with missionaries was in China but because of my brainwashed education I believed that missionaries were kind of vampires that come and kidnap North Korean children. That’s how North Korean textbooks, cartoons [and] dramas portray Christianity”.


The first time Cho escaped he was sent back to North Korea by Chinese authorities. Then he escaped again and was imprisoned in a Shanghai international prison where he met a South Korean gangster who prayed: “He suggested to me that I could start reading the Bible,” said Cho.


Today, North Koreans are celebrating the birth of the man they consider their ‘eternal god’: former leader Kim Il-sung. However, unlike the Christian God that thousands secretly worship, love for the former dictator is compulsory.

Read Timothy Cho’s blog on what life is really like for the people of North Korea today.


He had no idea how to pray at first, but his fellow inmate said: “Just say Amen at the end of your wishes,” and that’s what Cho did. He continued: “When I got out of this prison and when China decided to deport me to the Philippines I still believed because I prayed for my survival and freedom.”

When Cho finally escaped to the UK, he lived in Salford and studied International Relations. With Open Doors he has been working to improve the situation of North Koreans whether they are imprisoned for their religion or suffering as a result of food shortages (Human Rights Watch say the situation is dire) and limited access to medicine.

With the Covid-19 pandemic – North Korea continues to claim to have zero cases of the virus but is set to receive almost two million doses of AstraZeneca – this work has become more difficult because the regime has tightened rules, not just for Open Doors, but for “any other organisations that have been working between the North Korean and Chinese borders” said Cho.

However, the commitment hasn’t changed: “We are certainly ready on standby when things come back to help these people,” he says.