Nobel Peace Conference

We went to the Nobel Peace Laureates Conference yesterday and today. We were only planning on going to one session yesterday but it was so interesting that we decided to come back for a second helping. There was also a luncheon that you could have gone to but you had to have registered ahead of time and we, assuming it would be more boring than it was, did not.

Long story short, there was an uprising in Gwangju in 1980 where the citizens rebelled against an unjust government, took control of the city and then were crushed (killed, slaughtered, etc.) by the army 9 days later. It's called the May 18 uprising and really sparked a movement towards a truly democratic and free South Korea. The conference was to commemorate that and a conference that happened in 2000 between South & North Korea.

There were a ton of interesting speakers and they gave you a bunch of free stuff. I (Jon) was struck by how humble and "normal" looking the laureates all were. In the one session, there were reserved seats in front of where we were sitting. A bunch of people came and sat in them and I was wondering what made them so special. It was a lady that looked like a librarian, a business man type fellow, a lady that looked like she could have been a janitor and another lady that just looked like she was there for the heck of it. (One fellow actually took Emily's conference bag by accident. We thought it had our camera in it so I ran after him to get it back. He didn't have our camera but he did take her Kleenex.)

As it turns out, all of them had won Nobel Peace prizes. It's amazing how much of a difference one person really can make.

Anyway, here's some pictures!

Registration. If you look carefully, there are four lineups: Family names starting from A - J, then K, then L, then M - Z. I was confused until I remembered that nearly 50% of Koreans have the family name Lee, Kim or Park.

Here are some of the speakers. These are the people that have won the prizes as well as people representing organizations that have won peace prizes (eg. Amnesty International, International Red Cross, etc.) The fifth from the right is Mikhail Gorbachev. Sixth from the right is Kim Dae Jung, the former president of South Korea (the conference center where this was held is named after him).