Exclusive -- Aid Group: More Dictators Using 'North Korean Playbook' Against Christians

Christians around the world found themselves “easy targets” for both destabilizing terrorist groups and insecure dictators, the head of a global Christian aid organization told Breitbart News this weekend.

In a conversation on Friday, Ryan Brown, the CEO of Open Doors US, told Breitbart News the organization’s documentation of Christian persecution in the past year found an increase throughout the world in cases of autocratic governments “taking pages out of the North Korean playbook or even Chinese playbook … becom[ing] more and more intrusive in the lives of individual citizens.”

Breitbart News spoke with Brown on the occasion of the publication of Open Doors’ annual World Watch List, which ranks the top countries in the world persecuting Christians.

North Korea ranked number one as the world’s most repressive government, cementing its position after briefing losing it to Afghanistan in 2022 after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban jihadist organization.

“Being discovered to be a Christian in North Korea is effectively a death sentence,” Open Doors explains in its annual report. “Either believers will be deported to labour camps as political criminals, where they face a life of hard labor which few survive, or they are killed on the spot.”

Below the historically most repressive countries on the list, however, several Christian communities experienced a dramatic rise in persecution, from state-sponsored violence to the threat of terrorists laying siege to known Christian neighborhoods in an attempt to eradicate the faith through genocide. Nations that did not appear on the list of the top 50 most repressive states as recently as 2021 catapulted up the list. Among the most dramatic changes occurred in Nicaragua, which first appeared on the list in its 2023 edition, ranking at number 50, and rose 20 spots to the 30th most repressive state for Christians on the World Watch List published this month.

Nicaragua is a majority-Christian country run by a communist Sandinista government. An estimated 83 percent of Nicaraguans are Christians, most of them Catholic or Evangelical. Yet dictator Daniel Ortega and wife and “vice president” Rosario Murillo – who themselves claim to be Christians – have leveraged state power to erase Catholicism from the country. In the aftermath of the 2018 anti-communist protests in which Ortega killed over 300 people, the Sandinistas began targeting Catholicism as a threat to communism, in response to Catholic priests offering refuge to peaceful protesters from police brutality and torture.

The persecution escalated dramatically in 2022 as Ortega began to round up priests and either force them into prison for practicing Catholicism or into exile. The most prominent of Ortega’s victims is Bishop Rolando Álvarez of Matagalpa, who spent over a year in prison before being forcibly expelled to the Vatican on January 14. Ortega sentenced Álvarez to 26 years in prison in February for refusing to be exiled to the United States.

In December, Ortega and Murillo expanded their persecution to Evangelical groups that they formerly tolerated as competitors to the Catholicism they had declared “war” on in 2022.

“What we see specifically there is with Ortega and the autocratic rule and just really it’s come to the point where they see that Christian voice as a threat to the state,” Brown told Breitbart News, “and therefore they have been increasingly proactive in doing what they can to reduce the influence as well to reduce the reach of the church within Nicaraguan society.”

“Some folks have been declared enemies of the state even and stripped of citizenship and things along those lines,” he continued.

Brown noted that the case of Nicaragua “isn’t necessarily unique.”

“We see that in other parts of the world as well, this idea that these dictatorial, autocratic governments, these one-party type of systems even continuing to grow,” he explained. “In many ways you could even argue taking pages out of the North Korean playbook or even Chinese playbook is that the state becomes more and more intrusive in the lives of individual citizens for the preserving of power.”

Brown expressed particular concern for the situation in sub-Saharan Africa, and Nigeria in particular, which consistently ranks as the deadliest place to be a Christian. Nigeria ranked number 6 in both the 2024 and 2023 watch lists, up from seventh place in 2022 and ninth in 2021.

Neighboring Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso – all victims of military coups in the past three years – documented increases in Christian persecution in this year’s World Watch List.

“The whole Sub-Saharan Africa area, and specifically focusing on Nigeria … the complexion of persecution has really taken an increasing turn towards violence, the expression of that,” Brown told Breitbart News, adding that persecution in the region stood out for being “characterized by violence, by violence against individuals, as well as against places of worship or places of business that Christians own, places personal residences.”

“Let’s take churches or schools or hospitals that are run by Christians. In 2010 [World Watch List data], there were 2,110 reported cases of attacks against those institutions,” Brown noted. “This year in 2024, this is just the reported cases, there were over 14,766, so a huge impact.”

“If you take a look at other things like the attacks on Christian homes, that was an increase of 371 percent, in [20]23 it was 4,547, this year was 21,431. … those who’ve had to flee their homes, that went from 124,000 to almost 280,000 individuals,” he added.

Unlike Nicaragua, where the state is the main threat to freedom of religion, the Nigerian government neither actively persecutes Christians nor uses its law enforcement arm to contain threats against Christians, which stem primarily from jihadist groups.

In the north of the country, the Islamic State-affiliated group Boko Haram is the primary jihadist group threatening Christians, while in the Middle Belt, Fulani Muslim jihadist groups routinely raze Christian communities and massacre civilians in an attempt to steal their land. Presumed Fulani terrorists most recently killed an estimated 170 people in a Christian rampage in late December.

“In many of these cases, it’s a fragile state context and Christians as a minority – and, in many cases, a despised minority – are kind of last in line if you will as far as services or protection or things like that,” Brown told Breitbart News. “So those agents who are desiring to be instigators and continue to create instability within social and political dynamic, Christians can become easy targets.”

“They can often strike out against Christians – you know, burn homes, attack individuals – with a very little fear of reprisal that the government is going to do or be able to do anything or be willing to protect them.”

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