As tensions over North Korea's nuclear weapons program continue to mount, a group of human rights advocates who work with North Korean refugees has been telling American Christians they should help try to bring down that country's Stalinist regime.
Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor; the Rev. Douglas Shin, a Korean American minister from Los Angeles; and Chun Ki-Won, a South Korean evangelist -- accompanied by a refugee from North Korea -- have been addressing congregations, saying churches could undermine the North Korean government by making the plight of the isolated country's population a priority.
Their message has been enthusiastically received by some in the Los Angeles area's large Korean immigrant population.
Los Angeles dentist Jin-Hwan Choi was so moved when the group spoke recently to a church in Koreatown that he took visiting North Korean defector Yoo Sang-Jun, a man he hadn't met before, home when he learned that he needed a place to stay while in the city.
"We have to do something," Choi said. He plans to lobby members of Congress to support legislation sponsored by Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) that would make it easier for North Koreans to seek asylum in the United States.
Henry La, a retired Los Angeles social worker, said he was especially stirred by Vollertsen's comment that Christians could not afford to remain silent lest they allow history to repeat itself.
"My heart aches for the people in North Korea," La said. "Even people who aren't Koreans will feel as I do, if they heard what I heard."
Vollertsen, who spent 18 months in North Korea working for a German relief agency before he was banished, says conditions there are reminiscent of those during the Nazi era in his native land.
"As a German, I cannot keep silent. I must learn from history," he said. "As an emergency doctor, I cannot wait for 20 or 50 years for reunification" of North and South Korea. "I have to make an operation soon, because they are dying and starving."
Christian churches in the United States have the ability to change those conditions, he tells his audiences.
Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, used to be called the "Jerusalem of Asia" because of its many churches, he says, but the North Korean regime has systematically persecuted the nation's Christian residents.
