“Ask a North Korean” is an NK News column penned by North Korean defectors, most of whom left the DPRK within the last few years. 

Readers may submit their questions to defectors by emailing [email protected] and including their first name and city of residence.

Today’s question is from Daniel in Irvine, who asks about mosques in North Korea. While there are places of worship in North Korea, many outsiders claim that these are just fronts to show the outside world that it does allow freedom of religious belief as provided for in its own constitution.

Tae-il Shim — who lived in North Korea for decades before defecting in 2018 — talks about his encounters with religion during his time in the DPRK.

Got a question for Tae-il? Email it to [email protected] with your name and city. We’ll be publishing the best ones.

North Koreans have never once seen or heard of a mosque.

The only time we hear about the Muslim world is at school, where students take a dozen or so classes, among which are world history and world geography.

In world history, students learn about the politics, economy and military of the world’s roughly two-hundred countries. The character of that country is assessed according to whether it is pro-North Korea or anti-North Korea, or pro-American or anti-American.

In world geography, students study capital cities and population statistics of countries.

In middle school, the only thing taught about the Middle East is that it’s a region rich with crude oil. As a result, the Americans are constantly invading the Middle East in order to get their hands on this wealth.

Iran, Iraq and Libya are familiar topics. Students are taught that Libya’s capital city was bombed and their leader, Gaddafi, was assassinated because it stood up to the U.S.’s attempts to invade and steal their oil.

Iraq’s Saddam Hussein is also portrayed as a hero for standing up to U.S. aggression and praised for selling missiles to other anti-U.S. countries such as Syria.

In fact, let alone mosques, there aren’t really any churches, monasteries or temples in North Korea.

There are some Buddhist temples deep in the valleys, but there are no monks — only a handful of people following in the family profession of managing the temples.

In order to counter accusations of grave human rights abuses and suppressing religious freedom, the North Korean regime established the Changchung Cathedral in Pyongyang. 

However, this is not really a place where Christians go to worship: It’s a building intended to whitewash North Korea’s abuses against religious freedom. It’s only run like a Christian church when foreign visitors arrive on tours.

You won’t find real priests or churchgoers in attendance, though. Instead, the church is filled with carefully selected party members and security officials who only pretend to be believers when North Korea needs to put on a show.

This veneer of religious freedom presented to the outside world covers up all those North Koreans that are arrested as political criminals the moment they start talking about religion.

Those who smuggle bibles across the border from China are still executed by the Ministry of State Security or join the hundreds of thousands of others in political prison and labor camps.

Edited by James Fretwell