In South Korea’s capital, Seoul, there are now tens of thousands of North Korean refugees, all living with an intense emotional burden—and a US-founded organization is helping to alleviate it.

Freedom Speakers International (FSI) offers tuition-free and individualized mentorship for speaking in English and opportunities to engage with the international community through that most marvelous of personal development: public speaking.

They’ve since welcomed over 600 North Korean refugees to study English, public speaking, and career development at their office and at events around the city—and their work has landed one of the founders on the North Korean government’s official enemies list.

Casey Lartigue Jr., along with co-founder Eunkoo Lee, sat down with GNN in Seoul to discuss their life-changing refugee programs.

In 2013, FSI began connecting former English teachers from the totalitarian state known as North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) with mostly US volunteers to help them improve their skills, because they lacked the proficiency needed to teach in South Korea.

How many English-speaking refugees—or refugees at all for that matter—could there really be? Surely not enough to run a sustainable non-profit.

“The way I’ll put it is until the late 1990s only a handful of North Koreans escaped each year, a lot of them were part of the elite,” Lartigue told GNN. “But starting around 1998, about 1,000 North Koreans were escaping every year to South Korea.”

Since then, around 34,000 North Koreans have escaped to South Korea, mostly before 2020. “So, 34,000 is hard for them to punish,” he noted, addressing the commonly held belief that to flee the country meant certain punishment for family members who remain behind.

“When we first started, it was tutoring them in English, but I was on a different track,” Lartigue said. “I had a personal interest in North Korean refugees who wanted to tell their stories and then we merged those—so we had both the English tutoring and the public speaking. In 2015 we had our first speech contest because we had refugees who wanted to tell their stories; they wanted to speak out.”

There were interesting parallels between Lartigue’s former work at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., where he helped parents to advance school choice policies through public speaking, and his recent goals of giving North Koreans public speaking skills: the need to communicate the value of freedom is the same for both groups.

Their main projects these days, however, have narrowed to public speaking courses, which they can do in groups—a metamorphosis that occurred out of necessity, as COVID measures limited their in-person English tutoring—and also through publishing books.

“There are 5 main reasons that they tell us they want to engage in public speaking, and number 1 is just to raise awareness about what is going on in North Korea.”

“Second is advocacy: they want something done at North Korea—sanctions. Third is storytelling. There are people in North Korea who they know might have been tortured or executed by the DPRK, so they want to tell their stories.”

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An example of this third motivation came when FSI hosted a speech contest with the topic being the stories of North Korean women, and two of the speakers were men. “One wanted to the story about what happened to his sister; the other wanted to tell the story about what happened to his mother,” Lartigue said.

“Fourth is healing hearts. They have something inside that they want to get out, maybe PTSD. Fifth is to build confidence in themselves.”

When it comes to the books published by these brave souls, it’s about 11 years on average from the time they arrive to the publication date. Most come and have long adjustment periods. It’s only after they settle down, Lartigue said, that they begin to feel the need to speak out.

In the case of Songmi Han, she escaped in 2011 and published her book Greenlight to Freedom, in 2022.

“I didn’t know how dangerous it would be, but since my mom started sending brokers to rescue me, I started awakening,” the spritely youth, who only a month prior joined the FSI team, told GNN.

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“One of my neighbors was living for 10 years in China, but then she got captured and sent back to North Korea. At the time, every day we’re just looking for food, but she would say in China she said she never had to worry about her next meal.”

Saving lives

“That’s when I decided that in North Korea, there’s no future: I cannot see it, it’s so dark, but I’m sure others have their own reasons. My mother decided to escape because she wanted to make money. She would go to China, make money, and come rescue us from North Korea.”

Some of the things that FSI handles are straight out of a Russian book like The Gulag Archipelago. In one case, FSI published a book in English in 2022 that was written by a North Korean man who had been executed by the government, but not before he got a manuscript to a Japanese reporter that published the book in Japanese in 2002—the proceeds from which paid for the extraction of his two children from the country.

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FSI accepts donations but also volunteers who can contribute in a variety of ways, in particular to the public speaking mentorship activities. FSI is currently preparing for its 23rd speech contest in February.

While one might think that South Koreans would be the most likely volunteers, Lartigue said that for a long time, and still today, they’ve been staffed mostly by Americans, who are passionate about the project as befitting the free citizens from the self-styled leader of the Free World.

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