unicode issue in Perl CGI

hi friends,
   i have  a CGI form which recieves name, address etc and stores it in
Oracle database.
For english language it is working fine. but when i try to store some arabic
data it is
displayed as '??????' (in browser, when queried) .

also i want to know how to compare two unicode values in Perl.

eg  $city eq "xxxxxxxx"   where x  is a unicode data in hebrew



Regards,
uttam