Suzanne Scholte of the North Korea Freedom Coalition forwards the following:

“If he would have taken the money he used to build one missile and given it to his people, they would have so much to eat.”

Paula Zahn Report on North Korean Refugees

JASON CARROLL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: They hide their faces for fear their families back in North Korea will be imprisoned or worse if their identities are revealed. These four set foot on American soil just two months ago. They are among a handful of the first North Korean refugees officially recognized by the U.S. state department. One refugee, a soldier with the North Korean army, fled the country with his little sister.

Another, a schoolteacher. And the fourth, a factory worker. For the first time on television, they’ve agreed to tell us stories of life in their isolated homeland. One of torture, starvation and hopelessness.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): In other countries, criminals are people who commit murder, people who steal. But in North Korea, the criminals are people who are hungry and left the country or people who sought freedom and left the country.

CARROLL: Joe is 31. Like these other refugees, at one point he escaped North Korea into China, but was caught, repatriated and tortured in a place in the north he calls the prison of nightmares.

JOE, NORTH KOREAN REFUGEE (through translator): There is a stick that thick and that large. And they will place that between your calves and your thighs and make you kneel down that way. They will bind with rope your legs together. After that, I couldn’t walk for two days because my legs were so numb and I thought I was paralyzed.

CARROLL: Joe says his cell was too small to stand, forced to sit perfectly still, guards beat him if he dared move.

JOE: Because I was forced to sit for such long periods, the skin on my buttocks would rot. It festered and bled and maggots would attach themselves to the broken skin.

CARROLL: Joe’s sister is 20, Chan-Mi (ph). She says many in her family risk leaving rather than face starvation.

CHAN-MI, NORTH KOREAN REFUGEE (through translator): I would go to the mountain and strip the bark off trees and boil that and eat it.

CARROLL: Naomi, who is 33, says her family ate grass.

NAOMI, NORTH KOREAN REFUGEE (through translator): We would collect dried grass from the mountains and put it in the bathtub to wet it again and we would make a powder out of that and make noodles out of it.

CARROLL: Food was so scarce, Joe said some in his village, including himself, resorted to eating human remains.

JOE: They would make, it’s called sun dae (ph), it’s a Korean food, it’s like a sausage filled with noodles. They would make that with human intestines and I actually bought that and ate that.

CARROLL: For women, life can be especially harsh. All three we talked to say at one point they were sold into sexual slavery.

HANNAH, NORTH KOREAN REFUGEE (through translator): I felt like I was in hell.

CARROLL: Hannah, who is 36, says she was kidnapped, sold to a Chinese man and was forced to leave her daughter behind. She says her most joyous, yet at the same time heartbreaking moment, was when she learned the United States had accepted her as a refugee. But U.S. officials were unable to help her get her daughter, now 14, and still living in North Korea.

(on camera): You must miss her very, very much.

HANNAH: Every time I sit down to eat, my heart breaks. I feel like I’m sinning. My daughter is suffering back home and she has no mother and I’m here living so comfortably.

CARROLL (voice-over): They all feel guilty for having to leave loved ones behind. They also feel hatred toward their former leader Kim Jong-il.

HANNAH (through translator): If he would have taken the money he used to build one missile and given it to his people, they would have so much to eat.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Even if I just think of Kim Jong-Il, I want to carry a bomb and ignite it when I’m near him.

CARROLL: Before arriving in the United States, their only knowledge of the outside world came from North Korean government TV.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Whenever they picture America, they picture Americans preparing for war. And there’s also a television program that essentially just says bad things about Americans.

CARROLL: Do you remember what the program was called?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): The rotten and diseased capitalist world.

CARROLL: They’re adjusting to living in the United States. It’s hard for them to believe they’re in a country where people of different cultures and ways of life live freely.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Now that we are here and we see America, we see that it is a country that focuses on the person and that allows for human rights.

CARROLL: But they still worry for their families back home, living in a forsaken world filled with fear.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAHN: Jason I guess what amazes me, when you hear them painfully recount their stories, in spite of everything they’ve been through, it doesn’t appear as though their spirits have been broken.

CARROLL: They’re not broken, but there’s definitely a sense of guilt that they all feel. That was the overwhelming sense I got from them. And the other thing that struck me was just how inquisitive they were about everything.

You know, we did the interviews here. And so as they walk through, you know how we have pictures of Hurricane Katrina coverage, you know, they were looking at that, what’s that? I was trying to explain what Hurricane Katrina was. They had no idea. We were looking at cell phones. They were asking about that. They called them hand phones because they were unfamiliar with what cell phones were.

ZAHN: Sure, they’ve been so isolated so long.

CARROLL: Completely isolated.

ZAHN: So who’s taking care of them now that they’re here?

CARROLL: Well the Korean-American community has really embraced them. So they are staying with people connected to that community. But there’s a long road ahead for them. Culturally there’s a lot to get used to. They have to learn the language as well.

But they definitely feel grateful for being here, but I think you really got the sense of the guilt that they feel for being here as well, knowing that their loved ones are still back in North Korea.

ZAHN: And it’s horrible what those loved ones could continue to be going through. Jason Carroll, thanks for bringing that to us. You’ve worked a long shift today, appreciate those long hours, thanks.

7-12-06