Mr. President, Don't Shake Hands With Kim Jong Il

President Clinton should think twice about visiting North Korea. Sure, he might persuade North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, to sign a ballistic missile treaty. But he'll also reward him for the deaths of at least 3 million people from an avoidable famine. The remainder of the population has been driven to acts of unspeakable barbarism not seen since Pol Pot's Cambodia.

I've witnessed the horror. Despite the strict controls on foreign journalists, I recently led a British TV documentary team that managed to sneak footage out of North Korea, the most secretive state in the world. Our cameraman, Ahn Chol (a pseudonym), is a North Korean who lost both his parents to the famine and escaped to neighboring China two years ago. Risking execution, he ventured back into North Korea to secretly film what's really going on there for us. His footage is shocking. Starving children abandoned by the state. Orphans thrown into state asylums and left to die.

Our other cameraman risked his life to film U.S. aid sacks being sold on the North Korean black market, with emaciated children begging for food close by. The labels on the sacks read, "A present from America."

These aren't the well-fed tots sent out to parade with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Pyongyang in October to assure us that U.S. aid was getting through. There are 200,000 orphans believed to be starving, despite the fact that North Korea receives more food aid per capita than all but one country in the world. "The international aid is being channeled to the military," Ahn Chol says.

Clinton should know about Jang Gil-Su, a 15-year-old who risked being shot as he escaped to China. He and 14 members of his family are in hiding there, desperate to avoid the Chinese police who return North Korean refugees to face punishment, even death.

Jang's is a chilling case. Over the last three years, he has drawn and annotated 120 pictures of everyday life in his country. The Center for Saving Gil-Su's Family, headed by Prof. Dongkyu Kim of Korea University, gave these drawings to me, and they have been published in Seoul in book form. They show families eating anything to survive: pine bark, snakes, rats. A man at a market stall--"Man selling human flesh at a farmers market in Hoeroung city," writes Jang.