00.00.15 | Street noise, bell/people run in v/o | On Sundays at the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul arrive late and find standing room only (she's running in/ church music)
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00.00.25 | Crowd singing | Amen
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00.00.31 | Rev. Cho's Sermon | Dear God, help the North Koreans find the way to salvation. Amen!
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00.00.40 | v/o | Among the thousands listening this morning - is this small group. Not so long ago the people in this row would have been heroes. Today they are just anonymous faces in the crowd. Yet each of them has performed their own miracle - risking their lives and those of their families, to escape the most isolated, repressive society in the world.
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00.01.08 | Crowd singing in church/ they put their hands up
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00.01.22 | v/o | After the main mass - the group gathers for a private service at the North Korean mission. This is one of the few places defectors meet in a group and a rare chance for us to meet them without being shadowed by South Korean security police. Our attempts to make contact with defectors have been constantly monitored, at times barred. The South Korean Government wants the world to see nothing but the success stories.
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00.01.49 | Crowd singing, guitar and piano play
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00.01.53 | v/o (crowd singing and clapping) | Church groups like this provide the precious little community support available for defectors when they arrive. Even here though, they're being asked to take a leap of faith many are not willing to make.
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00.02.08 | Kim Hyung Duk preaching | I can't tell you that I am blessed, I can't make that kind of testimonial yet. In North Korea I was educated and brainwashed, so it's hard for me to become a believer overnight.
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00.02.24 | v/o | At 20 years of age Kim Hyung Duk left behind his entire family to cross the North Korean border into China on foot.. when he crossed over he weighed just 29 kilograms. Well, Kim found the freedom he wanted in the south, but also found himself an outcast, isolated and bewildered. This morning, he doesn't hide his disappointment.
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00.02.50 | Kim H. D. talking | The Christian population here is 11.2 million - given that number they're doing very little.
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00.03.00 | Kim appears on the screen alone
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00.03.02 | Kim's showing his scars/ v/o | Kim arrived in the south 3 years ago bringing little more than a family snapshot of two sisters he left behind.. and more scars than his years deserve. .. A legacy of torture at the hands of North Korean security police.
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00.03.17 | Kim talking | They hung me upside down with my hands cuffed behind me, they also subjedted me to water torture and electric shocks and made me endure forced exercise - they still use methods of torture that were used during Japanese colonialism.
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00.03.41 | v/o | In the South he found people indifferent to him. He found it impossible to adjust.
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00.03.48 | City street/crowd |
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00.03.50 | v/o | He says he was ill-equipped for the dog-eat-dog world of capitalist, money-hungry.. and fiercely competitive South Korea. In the North, everything is so tightly controlled - all decisions are made by the government .. housing, education, food rationing, even social status.
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00.04.09 | Kim alone again / v/o | Finally, he became so disenchanted with the south, Kim Hyung Duk tried going back
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00.04.16 | Kim talking | I thought there was no way for me to survive in this capitalist sovirety. South Korea did nothing to help me adjust and change my established way of thinking. The lack of government concern for me just made it so difficult for me to live here.
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00.04.34 | Ships on the sea |
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00.04.35 | v/o | Last year, he was caught at this South Korean port of Ulsan stowed away on a cargo ship bound for China.
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00.04.44 | Kim talking / ships
| I was interrogated by the Korean National Security, sent to a detention camp and imprisoned for 120 days.
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00.04.50 | Classroom full of people / Kim walks in / v/o
| Out of prison, he's now trying to fit in.. but still doubts whether South Korea wants him. |
00.04.59 | Big city road / street noise
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00.05.01 | v/o | It hasn't always been so.. after the bloody Korean War ended, South Korea welcomed defectors from the North. They were political trophies, feted as heroes.
As the situation worsens, South Korea can only expect the number of North Korean refugees to grow and with it, the bill for resettling them in the south.
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00.05.25 | v/o with city noise | It's hard to believe that South Korea, like North Korea, lay devastated after the Korean War. 44 years on and they're living an economic miracle while on the other hand, North Korea's economy is a shambles. South Koreans now look around at what they've got and ask themselves "why should we have to pay for the North's economic disaster?".
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00.05.46 | Dr. Lee Keum-Soon talking in a garden | Academically we are preparing so many measures to help North Korean people, but as a matter of fact, most South Korean people have mixed feeling about North Korea, kind of love and hatred toward North Koran people.
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00.06.03 | v/o | Doctor Lee Keum-Soon is helping devise the South Korean Government's response for a massive influx of refugees.
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00.06.13 | Dr. Lee talking | Everybody talks about national unification, unification is our assignment. They are saying those kinds of words, but as a matter of fact no-one wants to sacrifice their immediate interest.
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00.06.33 | v/o | It's extremely rare to find someone who'll risk being so outspoken on such a sensitive issue.
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00.06.39 | Dr. Lee | Even the government doesn't want national reunification. At the moment? They use reunification issues for their political interest. That is true.
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00.06.54 | Jong-Riol Lee Minister of National Unification
| Considering all the circumstances, we don't want sudden unification, but rather a certain peiod of understanding and exchange, sudden unification will only create a lot of burden to both Koreas.
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00.07.21 | Buddhists pray
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00.07.33 | v/o | The South Korean Government wants unification on its own terms and cracks down on unauthorised attempts to hurry the process. Here, members of the North Korean Buddhist Movement are offering one hundred days of prayer for the dying and famine struck in North Korea.
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00.07.53 | v/o | Nearby in the temple grounds, student radicals stage a hunger-strike and sit-in. Their cause? Unification with the North, and the right to protest. They are exercising that right today under threat of arrest by security police.
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00.08.11 | Korean student leader talking
| Everybody has been talking about re-unification, but if you can't trust one another - how can you become one nation? |
00.08.21 | She meets Mr Park on the street
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00.08.22 | v/o | Mr. Park, from the North Korean Buddhist movement, has offered to help us find other defectors..
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00.08.28 | Jill Colgan (Reporter) | Is it very far to the house.
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| Mr. Park | No...
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00.08.32 |
| He won't give us the address over the telephone but will take us there. We need a third party to get around the tight security net that guards defectors.
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00.08.42 | Mr. Park and her walking on the street / v/o | This security serves a dual purpose - it helps the government keep a lid on defectors' activities - and it protects them. One well-known defector was murdered outside his apartment earlier this year - police suspect North Korean agents of the killing.
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00.08.58 | They walk into a city appartment
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00.09.10 | In the flat v/o | In a small city apartment I meet Lee Chul Soo and his wife Cho Seung Hee. They came here in 1993 with their young daughter Jinshil, after escaping via China.
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00.09.27 | v/o | Mrs Cho works but her husband is still debilitated by the effects of frostbite suffered during many month of sleeping on streets and scavenging for food in China. They enjoy luxuries undreamt of in the North - fresh fruit and vegetables daily.. meat on a regular basis. But it's far from a lavish lifestyle.
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00.09.51 | Lee and Cho sitting on the floor, Cho talking
| I work every day and we live off that money - there's no extra money to lend out or to spare. |
00.09.58 | v/o | Yet they're subject to deeply held suspicion.. and resented for the government assistance they're given.
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00.10.04 | Lee talking
| There are those who despise us because we are from North Korea and we can just feel it.
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00.10.18 | Cho talking
| Here when our stories are told on television, many South Koreans think that we are lying and exaggerating.
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00.10.29 | They prepare the table for a meal
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00.10.33 | v/o | Most of the money they were given was spent leasing this small apartment. Now, the government is cutting back on money to newcomers.
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00.10.42 | Dr Lee talking | Before 1993 the government gave about three times more financial assistance to North Korean defectors.
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00.10.54 | Jong-Riol Lee
| Compared to the past, the government policy is more focussed on practical support. So defectors know they'll get more practical benefits. So it's not fair to say the amount of money has decreased.
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00.11.22 | Photos
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00.11.23 | v/o | It was nine years ago while studying in Moscow that a North Korean physics student called Kim Young Seh, learned the truth about life in the affluent south.
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00.11.35 | Still photos then Kim Young on the screen / Kim Young is talking
| I felt a strong sense of betrayal. We trusted them, we believed them, we even put our lives in therr hands. In reality those high up were telling lies to us to look after their own interests. At that time I realised North Korean society had to be changed. |
00.11.56 | v/o | In 1992 he was the subject of a dramatic tug-of-war between the Russian and North Korean governments' after seeking asylum in Moscow.
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00.12.07 | Kim Young and wife pushing pram in a park
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00.12.11 | v/o | Well-educated, he was better received in South Korea than most defectors .. yet he carries a burden that weighs more heavily than mere discrimination.
Last year, Kim married his South Korean wife and they now have a one month old son. But he left another wife.. another infant son, in North Korea.
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00.12.33 | Kim Young talking
| Every time I pray before a meal, I pray for my family and I pray for my son. When this one grows up I'll tell him he has a half-brother living in North Korea. Defecting like I have, my parentsand family may face severe unishment. Knowing that, I still had to do what I did. It makes me feel.. (pauses)if you could only understand a little bit - you will understand the pain and emotional hurt I am going through.
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00.13.22 | v/o | The North Korean Government has forcibly divorced Kim from his wife in North Korea and he knows she too has remarried. But the guilt of leaving family behind has driven defectors here to depression, alcoholism, even suicide.
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00.13.39 | City overview
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00.13.42 | v/o | The feeling of isolation in such a crowded, busy city, is tangible. There is no counselling available, and little sympathy.
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00.13.52 | Rally with drums and gongs
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00.13.57 | v/o | Everywhere the catch-cry is one Korea. Today in the heart of the city, religious groups have gathered on this national holiday to pray for peaceful unification.
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00.14.08 | Korean woman talking to the crowd
| Lord please help us escape ideologies and Cold War logics. Strike the sword and turn it into a scythe, so that 70 million Koreans can stand hand in hand and accept each other as brother and sister.
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00.14.28 | Piictures of female singer / v/o | But they're noisy minority, far outweighed by the surrounding indifference. It's fine to talk of grand notions, of peace and unification, harder to make it work if you can't live with your neighbour or don't want to pay for his house.
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00.14.50 | Singing girls
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00.14.55 | People on temporary outdoor stage/ v/o | The South Korean government is providing more practical support... giving defectors job training, building settlement centers for new arrivals. But what it has yet to build is a bridge to span fifty years of division and hostility.
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00.15.15 | ENDS |
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