3 Who Say They Escaped Tell of N. Korea Horrors : Human rights: Seoul supports claim that men fled brutal prison camps. Pyongyang denies accusations.

Kang Chol Hwan was 15 years old when, he says, he was first forced to participate in a stoning at a North Korean political prisoner camp. He was plagued with nightmares for days.

An Hyok tried to kill himself three times rather than bear the brutal labor, savage beatings and starvation that drove him and other inmates to dig out undigested kernels of corn from animal dung, he says.

The stories locked in the memory of An Myong Chol are largely unprintable: The former prison guard details atrocious executions that defy the imagination.

Can these tales of terror and torture, reports of the operation of a modern sort of Auschwitz in Communist North Korea, possibly be true?

North Korea vehemently says no. Amnesty International, the human rights group, says the stories are impossible to confirm. Even the international press, perhaps finding such tales too macabre to fathom, has barely published the accounts of these three young men who claim to have escaped from North Korean concentration camps.

But here they are, in a hotel in the South Korean capital: An Myong Chol, who says he worked at a camp as a guard and driver for eight years; An Hyok, who says he was imprisoned for three years after an unauthorized trip to China, and Kang, who says he and his family were confined for a decade after his grandfather was charged with betrayal and presumed executed.

They are the only known escapees from North Korea’s concentration camps, according to South Korean security officials, who arranged a recent six-hour interview with them.

The three men paint a chilling picture of inmates imprisoned for accidental offenses such as spilling ink on pictures of the late “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung. They say prisoners are forced to perform back-breaking labor hauling coal, mining gold or harvesting timber on a handful of corn and salt every day.

They say the captives endure vicious beatings for acts such as trying to eat prison guards’ garbage; An Hyok is disfigured, with a broken nose, bad back and broken front teeth. At night, they say, inmates must attend indoctrination sessions on the teachings of Kim.

Those deemed rehabilitated--such as An Hyok and Kang--are released. The two friends say they escaped together through China after their release and defected to South Korea in 1992.

But those sent to “maximum security areas”--spies, religious figures, collaborators with the Japanese or others who have become unforgivable ideological enemies of the Pyongyang regime--are condemned for life, deemed too worthless even for bullets, said An Myong Chol, the former driver. Instead, they face starvation and disease or excruciating death through medical experiments or sadistic games by prison guards.

“Once you start killing people, you develop a certain pleasure and brag about it,” said An Myong Chol, 26, who asserts that he worked at the camps from 1986 to September, 1994, before escaping through China and seeking political asylum in Seoul. “At first, the shock was so great I felt my heart drop, and I wondered, ‘Are they human or animals?’ But after years and years of hearing such talk, you become numb.”

Some South Korean experts argue that the concentration camps are the Pyongyang regime’s single most powerful tool of control, instilling a paralyzing fear into the public that produces mass obedience. The Communist regime is believed to operate at least five camps imprisoning 200,000 men, women and children.

“The most important government machine that supports [current North Korean leader] Kim Jong Il is the concentration camps,” said Cho Gab Je, editor of the Monthly Chosun magazine, which has extensively researched the camps. “Every North Korean has the fear that, if he commits even some small mistake, or criticizes communism or Kim’s leadership, he can be sent to the concentration camps without a trial. That fear makes them obey.”

Three generations of a family are often imprisoned for the crimes of one member, the three escapees said, under a Korean dynastic practice of yonjwa, or punishment because of kinship with an offender. An Myong Chol said this practice is diminishing because the camps were filled to capacity when he escaped.

But it is how Kang, 27, said he came to be uprooted from his home at age 9 and brought to the bleak, barbed-wire Yodok camp in 1977. Like tens of thousands of other Koreans, his grandparents immigrated to Pyongyang from Japan in the early 1960s, filled with hope and inspiration over reports that Kim had created a socialist paradise in North Korea.

Initially, Kang said his family was treated well and allowed to live with luxuries his grandparents brought from Kyoto: a car, refrigerator and several television sets. But one morning, 10 security officials burst into their apartments, announced that his grandfather had betrayed the Fatherland and forced him and his family into a Russian-made van for the journey to Yodok.

As a child, he was mainly made to attend school, where the glorious deeds and benevolence of the Great Leader were hammered into his head, he said. He also performed such work as gathering firewood, weeding cornfields and hauling stones.

His most vivid memories are the constant starvation and the 10 or so public executions he was made to attend every year. Most were condemned for trying to escape, and those who gave guards a hard time were executed not by firing squad but by the more gruesome method of hanging and stoning, he said. Kang recalls the shock he felt watching the battered bodies being ripped apart and smashed to the bone by the crowd’s stones.

“In the beginning, I felt like throwing up and suffered from nightmares, but after a while I got used to it,” said Kang, now majoring in international trade at a South Korean university.

For An Hyok, the Yodok camp was punishment for crossing into China on a lark. An, 27, also grew up in a privileged family: His father was a foreign trade official, his mother a teacher and he was a national Ping-Pong champion. An said his interest in China was piqued when he met some Chinese Koreans on a hiking trip and sensed their freedom: They wore long hair, spoke of nightclubs and regarded Kim Il Sung as an ordinary man--not the godlike figure An had been taught to revere.

With $200 from his father, An skated across a 20-yard-wide river near the Chinese border, bribed a guard and spent a month traveling in northern China, he said. But, missing his mother, he returned and reported his trip to security officials--which landed him in a detention center in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. “The timing wasn’t good. The authorities were about to launch a campaign against the winds of capitalism blowing through China,” said An, who only expected a reprimand.

At the detention center, he was forced to sit, motionless, with his head bowed for 18 hours a day; despite the lice and fleas that soon infested his body, moving to scratch them or looking up without permission was punished with vicious beatings.

After 18 months, he was transferred to Yodok. He was made to rise at 4 a.m., work in fields or mines until 8 p.m. and study Kim’s teachings until 11 p.m. Deprived of sleep and nutrition, he dropped from 158 pounds to 86 pounds in three years. An said he was constantly stumbling to meet his work quotas and was urinated on by guards when he fell asleep.

During the interview, the more An spoke, the more agitated he became, his face flushing and voice rising. “I’ve seen dogs give birth and people grabbing their puppies to boil them. I’ve seen people die from eating poisonous plants,” he said, describing the pervasive desperation. Rats and snakes--even seeds of peppers and pumpkins--are considered rare treats to captives, he said.

Clothed in thin rags held together by vines, families huddle together at night to avoid freezing to death in temperatures that drop as low as 25 degrees below zero. Almost all inmates suffer nutritional deficiency diseases, causing their skin to peel. Benumbed by misery, many become like animals, driven only by the survival instinct, the defectors said.

As a driver and guard, An Myong Chol admitted to beating some inmates, although executions were performed by the military security officers. He said he sometimes discovered corpses bearing marks of torture, including mutilations.

An decided to flee when his father committed suicide after being caught illicitly giving grain to a friend from the state distribution center. The act marked his son, and An drove to the Tumen River on the Chinese border and swam across to safety, he said.

Kang and An Hyok, both facing bleak futures even after their release from camp, fled together by crossing a frozen river into China. There they hid for about a month before making their way to a port where they stowed away on a Honduran freighter with help from South Korean crew members. They were handed over to a South Korean naval vessel in international waters.

Since arriving in Seoul, the three men have tried to tell their stories but say they are met with disbelief or skepticism. Amnesty International, for instance, does not accept testimony from defectors to the South because it may be tainted by extensive contacts with security officials here.

National Security Planning Agency officials say they do not program defectors to fabricate or exaggerate testimony.

But the government still may exploit them. The interviews with the three escapees, for instance, were arranged just as South Korea was coming under fire for its own human rights problems. The Washington-based Human Rights Watch / Asia issued a report last month blasting South Korean President Kim Young Sam’s crackdown on labor activists, while Amnesty International recently took Seoul to task for violating political freedoms with arrests of North Korean sympathizers.

“Something is terribly wrong when we hear Amnesty International is demanding that South Korea improve its human rights situation,” said An, the former driver. “If they are so concerned about human rights, why aren’t they doing anything about North Korea?”

Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.