A/HRC/25/CRP.1 112. Having already commenced in the early stages of Kim Il-sung’s rule, the persecution of political and ideological opponents intensified during the Korean War .44 A large number of Koreans—estimates range from 685,000 to millions—moved to the South during the war.45 Before 1945, Protestant Christians were a politically active and substantial population but many departed North Korea. The remaining population was often subject to suspicion. Many were arrested, imprisoned or executed. In 1951, Kim Il-sung reorganized the Ministry of Internal Affairs and transformed the Political Security Bureau into its own new ministry, the Ministry of Public Security, to suppress political opposition more effectively. 113. After the Korean War, Kim Il-sung turned his focus to further consolidating his power through a series of purges targeting rival factions. The factional struggle within the leadership was comprised of four groups. The Domestic Faction, numbering about 500, was Koreans who had worked through the underground Communist movement through the colonial period. Many of them had moved to the North from the South. The Yanan Faction were Koreans who had left for China in the 1920s and 1930s, initially basing themselves in Shanghai then moving with the Communists to their civil war headquarters of Yanan. The Soviet Korean Faction, ethnic Koreans born or raised in the Soviet Union, numbered between 150 and 200. Kim Il-sung was able to play one faction against another while supporting his own Guerrilla Faction, those Koreans who fought against Japanese forces in Manchuria with him. In December 1952, Kim Il-sung denounced factions in a long speech to the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party. In 1953, rumours of an aborted coup attempt by the Domestic Faction led to the arrest of their leaders. Twelve members of this group, leaders of the South Korean Workers’ Party responsible for organizing guerrilla activities in the South, were charged with planning a coup and spying for the United States. On the basis of trials that were highly orchestrated and heavily publicized, ten were convicted and sentenced to death while two were given long prison sentences.46 114. Kim Il-sung continued to face pressure within the leadership over his increasingly autocratic rule and emerging cult of personality as well as the direction of his economic policies. After 1953, the Soviet Union was itself undergoing a campaign of “deStalinization” that did not comport with Kim Il-sung’s efforts to consolidate his own rule. Instead, the Soviet Union was promoting collective leadership, peaceful co-existence and an end to the excesses of the Stalin era. 44 45 46 28 The official biography of Kim Il-sung, published by the DPRK, notes the following: “In December 1945, Kim Il Sung convened the Third Enlarged Executive Committee Meeting of the Central Organizing Committee of the CPNK in order to crush the machinations of the factionalists and local separatists who had been hindering the implementation of the Party’s organizational line, and radically improve Party work … The meeting took a historic measure to strengthen the Party’s central leadership organ by acclaiming Kim Il Sung as its head, and meted out stern punishment to the factionalists who had contravened the instructions of the Party Centre and violated Party discipline.” Kim Il Sung: Condensed Biography, pp. 122-123. According to the 1955 population and housing census conducted by the ROK Central Statistical Office, 735,501 persons of the total population had come from the North (before and during the Korean War). Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea (2013), p. 509. During the Armistice negotiations, the DPRK insisted that 500,000 Koreans who had been “taken away” from the North during the hostilities had to be returned. Transcript of Proceedings of the Armistice Negotiations of 1, 3 and 12 January 1952, as reflected in Korean War Abduction Research Institute, People of No Return: Korean War Abduction Pictorial History (Seoul, 2012), pp. 56-58. The Commission received no information indicating that those who left the North during the war were forcibly abducted. Andrei Lankov, From Stalin to Kim Il Sung, pp. 78-109.