Countering Kim

International | NORTH KOREA: Is diplomacy the solution to Kim Jong Il's tyranny? | Priya Abraham

THE SECRET FOOTAGE OF THE country hospital is three years old, but it hasn't lost its shock value. Dozens of sick North Koreans piled onto an open-bed truck, a makeshift ambulance. A blood-stained operating table from 1946 at the center of a bare concrete theater with no running water. Patients forced to hoist themselves through an open window, the only working entrance to the building.

German doctor and human-rights activist Norbert Vollertsen played his videotape during the Institute for Korean-American Studies symposium on Oct. 14 in Washington. He showed photographs—the ones he's shared before with journalists—of gaunt, hollow-eyed North Korean children resembling concentration camp inmates.

"I'm very impatient," Dr. Vollertsen said. "As an emergency doctor, you have to be. I'm not a politician. I learned that they are starving, they are dying, and I cannot wait for reunification in 10 years. I have to do something now."