Good that you have a partial solution. I am not sure which Perl was used to compile this program. It may be that it is not unicode compliant. Seach unicode Perl to see a list of ideas. Perhaps there is a solution I am not aware of.
There is also a wiki page on
Mobiperl that has pointers to download sites and other data. You may need to build your own version if you can solve the Perl issue.
Dale