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Salam! It's .. (Laughter)
It's incredible to be here in Libia
and so inspiring
to see the people of this country and those in the regions around
to be able to overcome authoritarian regimes
and to now have an opportunity
to create free and prosperous societies.
Thoughout history,
some governments have managed change,
when confronted,
and others, who have continued to deny
the basic dignity of their own people,
have been faced with the decision
and have been forced to change,
because the people have turned against them.
Like we saw throughout this past year.
And what is interesting about these situations,
is the unpredictability of them.
In many places where it seems like change is improbable
it very quickly shifts to becoming inevitable.
But I am here today to talk about a country,
North Korea, that is on the other side of the world,
and is also one of the world's most oppressive regimes.
Many people have written off North Korea
saying that it is hopeless,
it's unchanging and that it's impossible.
But I am here to tell you today
that North Korea is changing,
and that it's being driven by the people.
Most people when they think about North Korea
they know it from a level of high politics,
its reclusive leaders, nuclear weapons,
security issues, the largest militaristic country
in the world, with the fourth largest army.
Korea is where you have China, Japan, the U.S.
South and North Korea and Russia,
all come head to head.
You have 3 permanent members of the Security Council,
you have 4 countries with nuclear weapons,
and you have 5 of the largest economies in the world
and each of these countries have
strong interests and competing priorities.
This is the one place where the Cold War
never ended. So there is no trust.
Rather, there is a mutual, effective mutual deterrence
that exists, that has resulted in an ongoing stalemate.
So, at the level of high politics,
North Korea is not changing.
But if we look on the ground,
at the lives of the North Korean people,
what we see is that change is happening.
Now, don't get me wrong, North korea is still
incredibly closed off and incredibly impoverished.
But the amount of change that we have seen happen
over the last ten years has been incredible.
And it is something that if we continue to encourage,
and if we continue to see this type of change happen,
radical change in North Korea will eventually
become inevitable.
It's really the North Korean people who have suffered the most
out of this entire situation,
but it will be the North Korean people
who will ultimately drive the greatest change
for their own country.
That being said,
right now radical change in North Korea
may be impossible.
For six decades, the North Korean government,
the North Korean regime has created this
ruthlessly efficient system of political repression,
denying even the most basic human rights
to their own people.
There are severe restrictions on basic freedoms,
like movement, speech, expression, religion.
The North Korean government,
makes every effort to restrict information
that comes in, goes out, moves around the country.
This is one place, as many here in this room
are probably familiar, where the state has
complete monopoly on all information inside the country.
Everything is state-run,
media, television, newspaper, radio.
Essentially, the government tells the people
what they can believe, what to know,
and what not to know.
So here you have a place
where there is no connection to the outside world.
There is no internet in North Korea,
with the exception of a few elite who have access to it.
There is no Facebook or Twitter or Youtube
to connect to the outside world,
but instead there is an intranet,
it's with content that has been approved
by the government that people can access.
Even cell phones,
which were only reintroduced 3 years ago in 2009,
with a million subscribers out of 24 million people
in that country, and it is restricted to a
domestic network, even regional, inside the country.
And so there is a system that has been created
that makes it extremely difficult for the North Korean people
to have contact outside of the country.
And so this has been done in a very sistematic way
to ensure that ideas from outside, information about
the outside world, doesn't come into the country.
And so, if people are not happy with the country
you might ask, why they don't just leave?
Well, that's because, it's --
restriction of movement
is restricted in the country
and it is illegal to leave the country.
So, even if a North Korean wanted to leave,
they would do so at their on risk.
And many have, over the last decade, but they do so
at the risk of being shot at the border,
while trying to cross illegally into China.
Or they run the risk of being caught in China,
by the Chinese government, and being forcedly
repatriated back into the country,
where they will be punished.
North Koreans that at return may face
torture, detention, execution and imprisonment.
So the government is brutally effective
in maintaining this system of control,
perpetuating fear and oppression.
That is how they are able to control the people,
they are able to control information in the country.
And they are able to do this because of the network
of political prison camps that exist.
There are six prison camps and estimated to be
up to 200,000 North Koreans that are in these camps today.
Anyone who attempts to dissent,
anyone who attempts to rise up and challenge the government,
will be punished and put into the system of prison camps.
And the conditions inside are horrific.
You know, they have been compared to,
and these camps have existed five times longer
than the Nazi concentration camps
and twice as long as the Soviet Gulags.
And they still exist today,
even though the North Korean government
denies the existence of these camps.
And so, it's really because of this level of fear that people have
that we probably won't be seeing any North Korean
Aung San Suu Kyis or Liu Xiaobos,
in the near future.
The North Korean government also utilizes
a system of collective punishment,
which means that if you commit a crime or a perceived crime,
not only will you be imprisoned or punished,
but up to three generations of your family
will be punished.
That means you, your children and your parents
will all go into the camp, together.
Shin Do Yan is a man that worked for our organization.
He was born in 1982 in Camp number 14, Kaechon.
It's one of the most brutal labour camps in the country.
How is a person born into a prison camp system,
and it's because his parents
were guilty of a political crime,
and so, by association,
he was born into this camp,
and he lived there for 23 years.
At the age of 14, his mother and brother
attempted to escape from this camp.
He was interrogated, and tortured.
This is actually a picture he drew of himself
being tortured,
for months,
and later he was forced
to watch the execution of his mother and brother.
He saw his mother hanged and his brother shot.
When he was 21, he met a man in the camp,
this man was part of the elite,
he had been outside of the country
and he told Shin stories about the outside world.
He told him all these things
that he had eaten and places he had visited,
and began to create and stir this curiosity,
this desire inside of Shin, that never existed before.
It was unusual for Shin
to begin to think about these things.
And so in 2005,
Shin made an attempt to escape that camp,
and he is the only, he's one of the only known survivors,
to have successfully escaped that camp.
If you talk to Shin today,
he'll tell you
that one of the motivating factors
that caused him to leave was,
he was determined to know,
he was determined to know what it tasted like
to try meat.
He wanted to know what that would taste like,
because this man had talked about it so much in the camp
that that's what drove him,
that's what drove him to leave,
to be determined to make it outside.
So, as I said the North Korean government
denies the existence of these camps,
but you can go on Google Earth and find them yourself.
And enough North Koreans have escaped,
that have been in these prison camp system,
that they have outlined these exact camps,
what exists and in what parts of the camp.
So, despite these factors, that make change
in North Korea seemingly impossible,
as I mentioned, change is happening, already,
and it is happening on a grassroots level.
This is very important to know,
because again it's being driven by the people.
The people have relied on the State
to provide everything for them,
for so long.
But what happened was, in the '90s,
with the collapse of the state socialist economy,
North Korea faced a tragic famine
that killed up to a million North Korean people.
People were used to waiting
for the government to give them what they needed,
food, goods, and when that didn't come
you had up to a million North Koreans
who ended up starving to death.
But then you also had the introduction
of something that would become so pivotal to this change,
that's happened over the past decade,
the introduction of markets.
This became a survival mechanism.
You have people who took
matters into their own hands.
These markets were illegal then,
but they realized that they couldn't wait for the State
to provide for them any longer,
that they needed to go and to find a way
to survive on their own.
And so they went on, and they began to trade,
and they began to do things in the market
that would ensure their own survival.
There is a joke, a North Korean joke
that says, that there are two types of people in North Korea:
the type of people that are engaged in trade,
and the type of people who are dying.
It's not a funny joke, but it really illustrates
the level to which people placed an emphasis
and relied on these markets to survive.
And so it's through these markets
that we begin to see why North Korea
has been changing over the last decade.
Information slowly began to come in,
through things that were considered to be
relatively new technologies for North Korea
over the last decade: DVDs, USB thumb drives,
things that didn't really exist before,
and on these things was pretty innocuous material.
Wikipedia articles, computer games, books
and South Korean dramas.
These are extremely popular in North Korea,
and they have also become very important
because it's revealed to the North Korean people
actually, the prosperity and the wealth
of their South Korean brethren.
Something that they were told for such a long time
that their South Korean counterparts were
in much worse off conditions than they were.
And so it began to break down this ideology,
it began to break down the state of propaganda
of what they were being told.
Markets were also very important because
what happened was you began to have
private wealth.
People who were engaged in market activities
began to collect, began to accumulate private wealth
through engaging in the markets,
through selling goods and buying food.
And now money is so important,
because money means that
you can buy your own food.
You know, North Korea is a chronic food --
it is in a chronic food shortage,
it has been and it will continue to be so.
But the irony isn't that
there isn't any food in North Korea.
It's a problem that now
there is food, but can you afford to buy it?
And so people with money can afford to buy food
and people with money can also
bribe officials.
They can engage officials at different levels,
and they can give kickbacks,
or they can give bribes to them
to ensure that they can continue to engage
in these market activities.
And even officials,
they have begun to rely on needing
this type of money, and so what you see is
certain officials will use government trucks
to transport goods for markets,
or certain officials will get bribes to ensure that
electricity continues to flow into my house,
so that it doesn't stop.
And so you have people on various levels, engaged
in the markets, in these different
types of activities, and you also have this
explosion of corruption that happened in the country.
And so corruption is really what has allowed
a lot of these things to happen, a lot of these things
to continue in the country, because these officials
are complicit in part of this engagement.
And so you also begin to have ideological erosion.
As we mentioned before,
the people no longer really believe in the state,
because they are seeing otherwise.
Everything that they were told
is turning out not to be so true.
And so you have this generation
that is called the Jangmadang,
or "the market generation", that grew up in the '90s,
relying on the markets.
They were never, they never --
they remember only hardship, and so their loyalty
is not to the regime, but instead is to survival.
You also have the emergence of a new class,
a new rich, what this is, is people who have engaged
so successfully and so heavily in the market,
they have accumulated so much wealth,
and so now they have been able to create
the status for themselves that is independent
from the State.
And so this is very interesting to know,
because at the end of 2009,
the North Korean regime decided to
have a surprise currency reform
and, as you can imagine, the people were very upset.
This was the government's attempt
to roll back the market, they realized that, the people,
they realized how dependent the people had become on these markets,
and the separation that was being created,
and so they were attempting to roll back the markets,
and wipe out this private wealth.
So people who had worked so hard
to accumulate this wealth
were upset, and there were reports
that people were in the streets burning money,
you had people who were attempting to commit suicide
or who did commit suicide,
and you even had these
feisty middle aged, North Korean market ladies
who were fighting with officials,
arguing with them, because they were so upset.
This was a very pivotal event,
because it was a great awakening.
For the North Korean people, this is
one of the most important things that they remember.
Because they point back to this and they say
that that was when they completely lost all trust
for the government.
And for the North Korean government,
this was a serious miscalculation,
on their part, but they were also awakened
to the realization of how
integral the markets had become,
not only to the economy,
but to the North Korean people.
So the result of the famine
was also that you had tens of thousands,
if not hundreds of thousands of North Koreans
who did attempt to leave the country,
who were able to make it successfully into China,
you have estimates of up to 50,000
who may still be hiding in China today,
and our organization has helped to bring
these refugees safely out of China,
and helped them to resettle in countries
like South Korea and the U.S.
Now, this is really important,
because North Korea is this information blackhole.
North Korea is notorious as being this information blackhole.
One example of that is when Kim Jong-il died
at the end of last year,
it took two days
for the outside world to learn of his death.
That's how tightly controlled
the North Koreans were with that information.
And so the most of the information
that we know today about North Korea
is from North Koreans that have defected,
from refugees who have come out and told us
about the country.
So these refugees that are leaving,
it's very important,
because they'll continue to give information
about the country to the outside world.
But on top of that, they serve as a bridge
back into the country.
Many of our refugees stay in touch
with their families inside the country,
and this is possible because of brokers,
who use illegal Chinese cell phones throughout the country.
They are able to call their families,
and they are able to also send information
back into their families about
what is happening in the outside world.
And so, that information is so crucial,
because they are able to also send money back
that's feeding these markets, and telling their families
about the outside world.
For Shin,
you know, it was the knowledge of the outside world
that -- it was the knowledge of the outside world,
information about the outside world
and the idea of a better or an alternate life
that forced him to change his own situation.
What was possible for Shin on a micro level,
could very well be possible on a macro level
for North Korea.
We have an opportunity
to continue to increase the information and ideas.
We have an opportunity to empower the North Koreans
with tools and technology, so that they can
continue to accelerate these changes
and so that we can continue to see and help them
to create this internal pressures for change.
It's extremely important that we support
the efforts of the North Korean people on the inside,
because we have an opportunity to help them
to make a situation of change that is
seemengly impossible, become inevitable.
Thank you.
(Applause)