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Six years after launching a movement to attack religious persecution, a core group of political and Christian leaders on Wednesday issued a second "Statement of Conscience" that singles out Sudan and North Korea as the worst violators of human rights.

The torment "suffered by faith communities of Sudan and North Korea may be more brutal, more systematic, more deliberate, more implacable and more purely genocidal than those taking place anywhere in the world today," according to the statement supported by some 150 church, think-tank, and political leaders.

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) told the thought-shapers, government officials and clergy, including a bishop from Sudan and a woman tortured in a North Korean labor camp, that since the first summit in 1996 concern for religious persecution has moved from a hotel conference hall to Capitol Hill.

"We ask people to pray," Brownback said. "It has to happen in the heavenlies before it can happen in the U.S. Congress."

The afternoon summit, sponsored by the National Association of Evangelicals and the Center for Religious Freedom of Freedom House, supports President Bush's characterization of Sudan as "monstrous" and his inclusion of North Korea in the "axis of evil."

It calls for the administration to press North Korea to allow more aid from nongovernmental organizations, as well as greater resources generally for reporting abuses in all problem countries. The statement also vowed "never to commit the sin of silence" in the face of abuses.

The gathering came amid a surprise offer by North Korea to reopen sensitive arms talks with U.S. officials. Former North Korean labor camp prisoner Lee Soon Ok offered an emotional prayer for Christians imprisoned because of their faith. "For they simply sang hymns to you, and their faces were kicked and broken," she prayed.

Norbert Vollertsen, who as a visiting physician has documented numerous North Korean abuses, told those in attendance that the country's regime is an updated composite of the world's worst dictators. The government of Kim Jong-il views Christianity as the worst kind of subversion of the communist state, he said. Missionary pastor Tim Peters, who has helped run an underground railway through which North Koreans escape the country, added: "The fury with which North Korea meets Christianity is hard for us [in the West] to understand."

One of the achievements related to the first summit on January 23, 1996 was passage of the International Religious Freedom Act and its creation, in 1998, of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). In theory, the act makes religious freedom a priority of U.S. foreign policy.

Commission Chairman Michael Young told the second summit that North Korea is systematically starving 5 million of its own people—to little international criticism. Only 56 percent of Americans in a recent poll considered North Korea's government "evil"—compared with 80 percent regarding Iraq as such—and Young said this should not stop the administration from tying U.S. aid to human rights improvements in North Korea.

"We urge the president to speak out to North Korea itself," as well as urge Japan and European allies to press the communist regime for religious freedom, Young said.

A White House representative read a statement from President Bush. It included the assertion that, "Today, as we wage war against a global terror, our resolve to defend religious freedom around the world is as important as ever." It also recognized the religious element of Sudan's civil war.

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April (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46