On the Korean Peninsula

The same China that props up Justin's government props up another former leader useless son:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un opened a major political conference dedicated to agricultural improvement, state media reported Monday, amid outside assessments that the country’s chronic food insecurity is getting worse.

Recent unconfirmed reports have said an unknown number of North Koreans have died of hunger. But observers have seen no indication of mass deaths or famine in North Korea, though its food shortage has likely deepened due to pandemic-related curbs, persistent international sanctions and its own mismanagements.

During a high-level meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party that began Sunday, senior party officials reviewed last year’s work under state goals to accomplish “rural revolution in the new era,” the official Korean Central News Agency reported.

The report said that the meeting of the party’s Central Committee will determine “immediate, important” tasks on agricultural issues and “urgent tasks arising at the present stage of the national economic development.”

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North Korea has intensified its hounding of Christians, hunting for underground churches, executing believers and incarcerating their families in labour camps, aid groups have reported.

As Kim Jong-un seeks to tighten his grip on power through ideological indoctrination, Open Doors, a global mission organisation that supports persecuted Christians, said it had documented a “rise in reported incidents of violence” last year.

“In one horrifying incident that Open Doors heard about from reliable sources, several dozen North Korean believers from different underground churches were discovered and executed.

More than 100 members of their families were said to have been rounded up and sent to labour camps,” it said in its latest “World Watch List,” which tracks crackdowns on religious freedom.

Thomas Müller, the group’s Asia researcher, told the Telegraph there were nine known incidents where Christians had been sent to labour camps or executed between October 1 2021 and September 30 2022.

The information came from trusted North Korean sources, but exact numbers were difficult to ascertain as entire families were often carted away in the middle of the night, he said. The reports are impossible to independently verify due to North Korea’s information blackout.

There are estimated to be between 200,000 and 400,000 clandestine Christians in the country, mainly in the west where many are believed to have settled after an “explosion” of the religion in 1907.