HONG: My name is Adrian Hong and I'm Executive Director of a group called LiNK, Liberty in

North Korea. And I would like to thank everyone for taking the time out of days to come join

us for a little bit, and also for Google for graciously hosting this talk. I'm here to

speak with you about, I guess, a cause that we work on. It's called--essentially it's

the North Korean Humanize crisis and I did speak here at Google in fact in this very

room last year in June of 2007. And since then, as far as the issue itself has gone,

nothing has changed. I can say unequivocally that as far as the number of people that are

suffering, as far as the crisis goes and the depth of what is happening, whether it's in

China or North Korea, nothing really has changed. And in a way, it's become a fact of life for

the people that work on this issue and also for the people that suffer as a result of

this crisis. But I also think that the fact that progress is not happening, the fact that

fundamentally the issue continues to live on the way it is, means that we have to take

more actions to stop it. And so today we wanted to come by and share with you some of our

work and some of the issue itself and also introduce you to a special guest of ours,

Mr. Shin who is the main speaker for today. But before we go into that, I'm going to share

a little bit about the issue as a whole and give you a bit of background or context for,

I guess, Mr. Shin's experiences. North Korea today is possibly the last communist or totalitarian

country left in the world. A lot of "isms" and government systems that we write about

in high school or college have largely become extinct but North Korea has steadfastly and

stubbornly held onto a lot of relics of the past. The country has about 24 million people

and in the 1990s, an estimated two to three million North Koreans died of starvation,

which is one of the most painful ways to die as a human being. Two to three million North

Koreans, it's about one tenth of the population, starved to death. Without getting into human

rights, without getting into political or religious freedoms, just talking about health,

the country is at a unbelievably stunted and handicap state when it comes to public health,

when it comes to nutrition, when it comes to rate of malnutrition and malnourishment.

Large proportions of the population do not get daily food or rations of food. In fact,

as of last week, NGOs reported that this fall, most likely 200,000 to 300,000 North Koreans

would starve to death. We would lose 200,000 to 300,000 people from a resurgent famine.

I cannot comprehend what 200,000 or 300,000 people looks like. The most I could think

of is one football stadium worth of people, that's all I could think of. To me, these

numbers are very staggering and difficult to grasp and understand but at the end of

the day maybe the statistics don't really matter and the fact that is most relevant

to us is that people are suffering and dying when they don't need to. Diseases like tuberculosis,

scarlet fever, even the common cold spread throughout the North Korean countryside. And

because their immune systems are so weak from not having daily food and nourishment, many

people die of these diseases. Some diseases that you can get over in a day or two of sleep

here in the United States, people die of in North Korea. Moving beyond that, the education

system is at a very, very low level. Many children and young adults spend most of their

time learning about the government and the--and the leader; what Kim Jong-il used to do as

a child, anecdotes and stories about how he is a brilliant man and brilliant campaigner,

and artist, and writer, and musician. And very little attention is really spent on information

that actually is relevant for many North Korean people. And it's a system built to keep these

people in subservience to the country. Most North Korean children especially of this generation,

of our generation, are physically stunted. If you meet a North Korean, if any of you

have ever had the luxury of meeting a North Korean, whether they're diplomat or an athlete

or a refugee, they're usually very small and very frail. If they're a survivor of a concentration

camp, they usually have telltale signs of forced labor as a child; arms that are disproportionately

long, a slight limp or a slight bend towards one direction, and you'll recognize that in

Mr. Shin when you meet him in a few minutes. Children that do not get regular food do not

suffer just from physical stunting. They are not just a foot or a foot and a half shorter

than their average peers anywhere else, they also suffer from permanent brain damage. If

you do not get regular nourishment from the ages of zero to maybe five, the crucial critical

formative years, for life you will have permanent mental stunting. It's something that you cannot

recover from. An entire generation of North Korean people have been lost to this, they're

a lost generation in a lot of ways, and the world has largely not noticed. And we began

this work because we found it shocking that this kind of suffering on this scale could

happen in the world and nobody would pay attention, and the world would continue to move and we

would continue to go about our days without changing any of our habits or changing anything

at all. That's just the health situation. Beyond that, once we get into the spectrum

of freedoms and civil liberties, every single freedom, every single one, that we understand

and appreciate here in this room or in this country or pretty much anywhere else in the

western world does not exist in North Korea. Freedoms of religions, of speech--I mean,

of freedoms of religion, of speech, assembly, of movement, of descent, the right to complain

that the ration was not enough, the right to complain about the leader of the government,

the right to go to the town next door to visit your aunts or uncle. In North Korea, you cannot

leave your hometown without a government permit. You cannot go and sell goods that you have

on a market without permission from the government. Black market--essentially, a black market

has been created and the soldiers continue to clamp down on it, when people are essentially

selling food to survive because they're starving to death. All radios and televisions in North

Korea are built just to accept government frequencies. And if you'd alter your radio

or television to accept other frequencies, say Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, or

broadcast from Japan, China, Russia, South Korea or even the United States, you will

be sent to prison. And so following along that note, North Korea has developed an extensive

system of concentration camps throughout the country. A network of camp that has several

different tiers, the worst tier is called the Total Control Zone which Mr. Shin is the

only known survivor of. Beyond that, there are several other tiers of forced labor and

reeducation camps. We have satellite imagery of these camps, we know the exact locations

of every single one of them. We know which buildings are used for ration distribution,

or for the military barracks, or for the public executions. We know where the barbwire runs.

We know what the hours of the guard routes are, and who runs each camp. We know everything

about these camps and nothing has been done. So in these camps today, an estimated quarter

million North Koreans live and die in this system of political prison camps. The kind

of crimes that have been committed for these people to enter these camps range from folding

a newspaper so that the crease fell on a picture of Kim Jong-il's face, to sitting on a picture

of the dear leader, to not wearing a red pin--if any of you have seen pictures or photo galleries

of North Korea and life in North Korea, every North Korean has a red pin on their left lapel

and that image has either a picture of Kim Jong-il, the former leader, or Kim Jong-un,

the current leader, his son. If you do not have that, you are not being sufficiently

patriotic or sufficiently dedicated to the socialist paradise and communist revolution,

and essentially you will be dealt with accordingly. Most of the people in these political prison

camps have no idea why they're there and North Korea also pursues a policy that punishes

three generations of people for every crime committed. In other words, if I commit a crime,

my children and grandchildren will also be sent to these camps. My father and mother,

my aunt and uncle, my cousins, anybody in my direct relation will be punished for what

I've done. So if you've lived in North Korea, if you were raised in that country, if you

are not among the political and military elites that have the luxury to get food and, in fact,

iPods and Mercedes-Benzes evidently, and Hennessy and Rolexes. If you're not among the party

elite, you're probably not going to be entirely too happy. And many North Koreans have manifested

that desire for freedom or food by leaving. It's estimated that a quarter to half a million

North Koreans have left North Korea, crossed the border into China, over the last decade.

They are tens of thousands of North Koreans right now on the streets in this country and

the fact of the matter is, they're refugees. North Korea's law, their very constitution

and national security law say, if you leave the country without permission, you will be

committing treason and you're punishable--it's punishable by death. It's a capital crime.

If you leave the country without permission because you wanted food, your uncle went ahead,

your family left and you're catching up with them, or even because you got drunk and stumbled

across the border, you left the country without permission from the dear leader, and the punishment

can go up to death. And most refugees that get caught and sent back to North Korea are

severely tortured and interrogated, pregnant women have babies forcibly aborted, children

are often sold into the black market, and the worse case scenario is, especially if

you met with a South Korean or an American or a Westerner or became a Christian for example

or went to an underground church, you will be sent to a concentration camp. And in many

cases you will be publicly executed. North Korea is one of the few countries remaining

in the world that holds public executions where they bring out the entire village and

town to watch. In fact, two months ago, there was an execution of three individuals in North

Korea where 150,000 villagers all came out and were forced to watch what had happened.

They were shot at the stake, and their crime was having attempted to leave to China. That

was their only crime. The Chinese government has captured and repatriate North Korean refugees

by the thousands every month for the last 10-15 years. I myself and several of my colleagues

were arrested in China about a year and a half ago for just protecting refugees, for

giving them food and shelter and just trying to get them to safety. The Chinese government

criminalizes this act in violation of international law, as they seem to do everywhere else, and

essentially, sends these refugees back to their deaths, knowing exactly what happens.

Until I went to prison, I assumed that maybe the authorities were completely aware of what

North Korea does to them. I assumed that maybe it was a top down initiative from Beijing

and their government, and they were just ordering the locals to comply and that the locals maybe

did not know exactly what they were doing. But I spent a lot of time in interrogation

and a lot of time speaking with Chinese officials and guards and foreign ministry officials,

and they all know exactly what happens to North Koreans when they're sent back to their

country. They're tortured, they're put in concentration camps where they're executed.

So, what I've come here to tell you--share with you is that we have on our hands possibly

the worst humanitarian crisis in the 21st Century. And there are a lot of crises that

demand our attention rightfully so. And this week, in particular, Burma is having a significant

amount of issues. We've had crises in Darfur for the last five years. We've called it a

genocide for five years and we still have not done anything. But North Korea is unique

in a lot of ways. And the greatest distinction I can make with North Korea is that the scale

of human suffering and the amount of energy and effort that has gone into perpetuating

the system far surpasses anything else. This is not people dying of machetes or mob violence.

This is not a natural disaster or crisis where people--officials are negligent of responding

and therefore causing suffering. This is not a natural born famine that is spreading throughout

the country and the government just doesn't want to intervene so it won't. It is not a

situation where you have rival feudal lord fighting over natural resources or even a

civil war. The North Korean government has gone through the effort and spent the money

and resources to build concentration camps. It takes a lot of energy to build these places.

One of these camps is 400 square miles, 400 square miles in size. The camp that Mr. Shin

was born and raised in, he spent 24 years of his life in this camp, had 40,000 inmates,

40,000 inmates. The amount of energy and the amount of thought and preparation that the

North Korean government has spent on this system I think is not just indicative of the

culture and mentality that the government has, but indicative of a human rights violation

or crimes against humanities that far surpasses anything else, that demands an answer from

humanity. And I'll be honest with you, over the last four years of doing this work, I'm

not exactly optimistic about the United Nations, or the US Government, or the powers that be.

But I remain optimistic about the potential of the grassroots and the potentials of individuals

like yourselves to do something about this crisis. The only lives that we've been able

to save for the last four years have been saved as a result of average people, common

individuals around the world, getting together and doing something. And we have been able

to save lives. And so essentially, we're here not just to share our stories and to share

Mr. Shin's experiences but also to ask for help. And so, I'll share one story with you

before Mr. Shin comes up. The story of the Good Samaritan which many of us have learned

whether offhand or going to church or--it's just culturally, we are aware of these things.

It was told by, I guess, Jesus in the Bible, and he talks about this guy that was beaten

on the side of a road and left for dead. And a priest walks by and ignores him, a Levi

walks by and ignores him, and later on this third guy who was a Samaritan, who at that