Seated between the legs of her mother, the little girl turns the pages of a magazine with the unskilled hands of a four year-old. She counts them aloud, and, at the end, she takes the magazine and holds it tight against her, lifting her head smiling. Then her empty eyes appear: she is blind. From a nearby teenager, at first we can only see the top of the head, then a little more: he is sitting on a mat, shoulders sunk, knees under the chin. Then the camera shows his feet: he has no toes. They froze while spending some time in jail. He is 15.

The images of these two North Korean children are part of some five hours of recorded video testimony of hunger migrants, collected in the past two months on the Chinese side of the Sino-Korean border by a humanitarian organization that we shall not identify for security reasons. The thirty or so interviews, of which more than half come from refugees that have crossed the Tumen river (demarcating the border) since the beginning of this year, reveal aspects of life under the rule of the last Stalinist regime on the planet.

These testimonies are partial, for sure, may be also dramatized by people who have lived for almost ten years in a nightmarish system in ruin where the daily preoccupation is to survive, where going to the hospital is useless because there is no medication and the staff is busy stealing food, and where the only governmental function still active is repression. But there is in the eyes of these refugees, in these marked faces, in the confused stories of simple people, several dozens of which we met personally in the past two years along the "hunger river", a truth full of suffering that we cannot ignore. These migrants come from a bankrupt country, a sinister society: they talk of hospitals without heat, of ghost cities without electricity where "we cannot even see if someone is dying next to us," and where water is contaminated, of girls who sell themselves to Chinese women traders and end up in brothels.

The blind girl arrived in China at the end of last year with her mother and brother to meet their father from whom they had been separated since 1998. The family comes from Saepiol county in North Hamgyong province. The father worked in the Aoji coal mine. He came to China for the first time to seek help from humanitarian organizations (mostly South Koreans) who work in the Yanbian region at the Sino-Korean border. Having come back empty-handed, he tried again with his son. Having stayed behind, the mother had to sell everything the family owned and was left to scavenge for food with her infant daughter. "We ate like beggars: herbs, roots, but then we felt nauseous and had diarrhea," she told us. Malnourished, she was never able to lactate, and the little girl, fed boiled corn, became blind when she was 8 months old. The most desperate eat tree bark, leaves and grass, which are hard to digest and cause intestinal problems and internal hemorrhage.

In China, at the end of 1999, father and son were captured, tied up and repatriated to the DPRK. The teenager was detained in a camp in Onsong, a mining town near the border where he would stay about 15 days. It was winter (temperatures hovered around -10 to -15° C and the camp had no heating), and he did not have shoes; after a few days his toes froze. With broken words and mimicking punches, the child tells us that young prisoners are beaten. They were about 15, boys and girls. "The strongest steal from the others" he says. Liberated, he went on to beg for food in markets pulling himself on his knees. His mother finally found him "laying in the street." She brought him back on her back. The toes of the child fell by themselves, and she succeeded in preventing gangrene from spreading in one of the legs. Without resources, she decided to go to China, but the son was afraid of jail and disappeared. In November last year, she left with her blind daughter, crossing the frozen Tumen after having paid the guards. The next month, the son was found by an uncle and sent to China. Today, the family is in Southeast Asia waiting for a South Korean visa.

The family's odyssey is revealing. The father, 37, left for China when the mine stopped production: "We were short of food even before the death of Kim Il-sung, in 1994. After, we were given 5 kilos of rice per month. We cannot work with so little. And we started to steal coal that we would sell on the black market. Then, electricity was cut and the mine was flooded." His brother-in-law died of exhaustion one New Year's day trying to extract coal: "He fell on the railway tract. As it was dark, nobody saw him, and a train rode over him." His uncle, his aunt and his cousin's husband were executed last year: "They were so hungry that they ate a buffalo. They were peasants, but the buffalo belonged to the government." The mother tells of a lot of deaths: her sister of 43 and her two cousins of 4 and 12 died of hunger in May 1999. All from Hamgyong province.

We could be under the impression that the diplomatic overtures triggered by the visit to Pyongyang, in June 2000, of South Korean president Kim Dae-jung had contributed to attenuate the misery. These testimonies demonstrate that it is not so. They confirm, to the contrary, the bleak picture drawn by German Doctor Norbert Vollertsen, a member of the organization Cap Anamur, who was deported from the DPRK in December 2000 for denouncing the daily violations of human rights. They also confirm suspicions that a portion of the foreign food aid does not make its way to the segments of population most threatened, despite the reassurances from the people in charge of the international organizations active in North Korea. Most of the refugees interviewed come from regions theoretically covered by these international organizations, except for a few regions that are not, for military reasons.

In the course of the past two years, some humanitarian organizations (Doctors without Borders and Action Contre la Faim, among others) left the DPRK because they estimated that they could not control the aid that they were contributing. Others stayed, including the United Nations' organizations. The latter brought considerable help to North Korea, $635 since 1995 by the World Food Program (WFP) alone, and they can feed as many as 8 million of the 22 million inhabitants.

Despite the massive aid given for the past seven years, the food situation in the DPRK remains "catastrophic," declared in December 2000 the WFP coordinator in Pyongyang, Dave Morton. And for 2001, the UN asks for 800,000 tons of food and $68 million to compensate for, among others, a deteriorating sanitation system.

"What do you eat?" The question annoys this man that we see from the back. He arrived on January 31st - the day before the interview - from the mining town of Ondok, in Rajin-Sanbong, a port city that the North would like to develop into a free-trade zone but that has not received any interest from investors. "You don't know? Corn. Those in power eat it whole just like rice. Others eat it as gruel." That's his first trip to China. He wants to go back as soon as possible with a little bit of money: He left his family behind and promised the border guard to pay him. He was a wood carrier. For the past three or four years, he says, the authorities have not been able to stop the movement of people, which was previously not allowed, and now people just board trains without ticket nor authorization.

In the past, it took three hours to cover the 150 kilometers between Musan near the Chinese border and Chongjin, a port city on the Sea of Japan, according to an 18 year-old youth who has come and gone across the border about twenty times: now, it takes 24 hours. He was detained several times in the jails of the port cities of Nampo and Chongjin. They were forty in a cell and were given only 150 grams of corn gruel twice a day, he says. "In 1999 again, I saw twelve of my mates die. The troublemakers are chained, denied food and beaten to death, especially Christians."

Since the visit of South Korean President Kim Dae-jung to Pyongyang, it appears that the prisoners are treated better: "In general, if we are caught going to or coming back from China, we are interrogated, beaten with clubs, and robbed of everything we have. But it seems like Kim Jong-il has said that refugees are harmless and that as a consequence should not be beaten anymore," says the wood carrier. Apart from this he sees no change: "When Kim DJ came, we had great hopes. We thought that all would be fixed. And then nothing changed. Today, we expect nothing. We even wonder whether he really came." Does the population accept this situation? "To revolt? It's unthinkable! If you raise your head, it is chopped. You and your family," he says.

All refugees know that their country receives foreign aid. But few among them claim having received any. The wood carrier heard on South Korean radio (which is forbidden) that tons of rice had arrived from South Korea and the US. "I never saw any of it, and I wonder if the South didn't lie about that," he says. In Chongjin, a youth heard that when a ship carrying aid is unloaded under UN watch, the military dresses as civilians and maneuvers to take everything. Another refugee from Onsong says that several times he carried aid bags in 1997 and 1998 from a hangar where the food was stocked "in case of war" to a kindergarten, in anticipation of a UN inspection.

The aid is not distributed regularly but for certain occasions, such as the birthdays of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. As for medicine, those who have money can get some on the black market, supplied by nurses and doctors who sell it to make ends meet. The others must turn to medicinal herbs.

Along with the famine, the collapse of the sanitary infrastructure slowly takes its toll on the population. "It is useless to go to the hospital: you will not be cured. And you even risk catching pneumonia because there is no heating," says the mother of the child with the toeless feet. The hospitals have become "empty shells." They lack the most basic: disinfectant, syringes, surgical gloves. In the winter, it is freezing and in the summer they are infested with insects. According to Dr. Vollertsen, the scenes he has seen in the hospitals (including surgery without anesthesia) convinced him that "foreign aid is not used to save the lives that it should."

Malnutrition, the lack of clean water and disease add up, and those who get sick cannot recover. The politics of opening, in which most European countries have embarked not to fall too far behind the US (which, in the meantime has changed presidents), serves geo-strategic goals whose only objectives are stability on the peninsula. Does this contribute to what US Congressman Tony Hall, who went to the DPRK in November, qualifies as "one of the greatest disasters of the last 50 years?" To a certain point - only.

(Translated from French by Pascal Comeau)