Refugees from North Korea speak wanly of an austere life, one in which they live in a cramped cave scooped out from the side of a Chinese hill, subsisting on whatever rabbits and birds they're able to catch in makeshift wire traps.
As the video continues, you realize that something else is horribly askew. A boy, an emaciated 5-year-old barely bigger than a baby, has plucked something from his parent's hands and is putting it in his mouth. The child, it finally hits you, is smoking a cigarette.
Kim Jung-eun, the Korean-American producer who shot the footage, was stunned as she recorded this small yet brazen display of dysfunction. It occurs early in a three-part Nightline series, scheduled to begin its broadcast on ABC stations, including WMAR, tonight at 11:35 p.m. The series is based on Kim's tough-minded documentary, which allows the refugees in northeast China to recount stories of their tangled lives. Coming a few months after the network sought to dump Nightline for David Letterman, the series provides an example of what Nightline, at its best, can offer viewers - tough fare not ordinarily found on network television.
Currently, Americans seem to have great appetite for news from central Asia, or the Middle East, as tensions rise and fall. Other major media outlets have reported on the famine and oppression of North Korea, but without such powerful material. The nation's officials allow in few outside journalists, and those who are admitted find their activities heavily circumscribed. Kim wanted to capture life behind the curtain.
Between her paying assignments as a television producer, Kim interviewed hundreds of refugees on a series of furtive trips to the Jilin province of China during 1999 and 2000. The ensuing documentary has won several major awards, including Australia's top honors for foreign journalism and a reporting prize administered by the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
Between several hundred thousand and 2 million North Koreans have died from famine over the past seven years, according to varying international relief agency estimates. Others have been persecuted by a Stalinist-style state. In recent months, some North Koreans have sought asylum at embassies for other nations in China. Many tens of thousands of North Koreans have fled over the Yumen River to China, where the promise of food and relative freedom awaits, along with a chance to earn money that can be sent back to desperate relatives.
Yet risks abound in China, as well. As the hundreds of interviews conducted by Kim show, people take advantage of the refugees, kidnapping them and selling them into servitude and prostitution.
Parents are often forced to give up their children to orphanages for them to have even the hope of good nutrition and education. Chinese police receive a bounty for turning in North Korean refugees, who are sent back and often oppressed as political dissidents. Kim said she was denied a visa to visit North Korea for her work. But the reflected misery in China helped to illustrate what is happening behind North Korea's borders.
"It was a lot worse than I imagined for the refugees," Kim, 42, said in a telephone interview from her home in Seoul, South Korea. "The conditions under which these people were living, in hiding - constant fear, virtually begging for food, they couldn't find jobs - they had to rely really on other people."
This week, viewers will see two parents relinquishing their children to an underground orphanage so they may be fed. Another man, hidden in a hole in a benefactor's floor, remarks bitterly, "This is a pig's life, isn't it?" One child shows the cigarette burns lining his arms, courtesy of people who purchased his service. Other kids, younger than 10 years old, describe the deaths of their parents, siblings and friends from starvation, and talk about public executions. Teens who have hustled some money are shown preparing the bills into small packets so they can be swallowed and excreted when they visit their relatives back home.
Despite such hardships, Kim wants you to remember: These are the survivors, the ones scratching for a glimmer of hope.
Leroy Sievers, the executive producer for Nightline, said his jaw dropped as he first watched Kim's documentary at anchor Ted Koppel's suggestion. "I have no idea how people will respond to this," Sievers said. "My guess is that it will trouble them."
Nightline has the liberty to devote significant network air time to troubling matters outside the immediate spotlight of the front pages because it does not appear during prime time, Sievers said. Instead, the executive producer thinks of this series as fulfilling the mandate set out by Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel during a retreat a few years ago: One of the things you have to do is speak for the people who have no voice.
One North Korean couple made the anguishing decision to leave a daughter behind because she was too frail to move as they sought money for food. "I'm not a politician," the father said. "I just came here [to China] because I wanted to live. I hope people in America and other countries will help us North Koreans here."