Neatly dressed in a shirt and trousers donated by aid workers, a lean, handsome man in his 20s sits in a dingy hotel room in Yanji, a Chinese town a few kilometres from the border with North Korea. Animatedly, he recalls the day in May 1998 when he and 19 other North Korean men were herded, stumbling, into one of their country's labour camps.

The young border guard, surnamed Kim (full names in this story are withheld to protect identities), was suffering a high fever and, like his fellow inmates, had already endured weeks of beatings. His crime: to let a starving family cross the Tumen River separating North Korea from China. "Plagued with various illnesses, we were all in such critical condition that standing on our own was very difficult," he recalls. He speaks with such passion and intensity that the Korean interpreter occasionally hushes him to avoid arousing the attention of Chinese workers wandering in the hallway outside.

Kim survived a year in the camp, and fled North Korea a few days after being released. Others weren't so lucky: A series of interviews with North Korean refugees and aid workers along the China-North Korea border provides glimpses of a harrowing network of labour camps that house petty criminals and defectors in the reclusive country. Their grim accounts suggest North Korea's gulag system is at least as extensive and barbaric as that of the former Soviet Union--in some cases worse. Survivors and others with ties to officials running the camps say more than a third of those who enter die. Though there are no independent sources available to verify the accounts, their consistency, backed by circumstantial evidence, lend them considerable credibility.

Aid workers in China say North Korea's secretive camp system has expanded greatly since 1995, when North Korea's famine worsened and a flood of refugees began pouring into China. Workers with non-governmental organizations operating in China near the border estimate that more than 200,000 North Koreans have fled into China since then. (The numbers have decreased in recent months as the food situation has eased slightly, the United Nations and aid workers have said.) China has treated them as illegal aliens--sometimes it turns a blind eye, but some 10,000 to 20,000 are forcibly returned to North Korea each year, according to sources in Yanji. The large number of forcible repatriations of food migrants--which is said to often result in imprisonment or execution--has left Chinese officials worried about the potential for unrest along the border. Analysts say China fears that granting refugee status to North Koreans would lead to a flood of refugees and could damage China's long-standing ties with Pyongyang.

Now healthy after four months in China, Kim relates how, on his first day, guards made him put on lice-covered uniforms and beat him when he tried to shake the lice off. He subsisted on a bowl of ground corn and corn cob boiled into gruel, supplemented by frogs and rats that he caught. He and his fellow inmates buried those who died in shallow graves, covered by just enough soil for them to go unnoticed. Families, he says, were not informed of their sons' deaths. "They would simply say, 'He's been reformed,'" Kim says.

The labour camps have become both a humanitarian and diplomatic issue: In October, Mary Robinson, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in Seoul that North Korean refugees in China who are sent home are at risk. "It is most important that we recognize that if they are forced to return, their situation is extremely serious," she said, adding that the escapees' situation "touches on" UN conventions that protect refugees from returning to countries where they face severe penalties for having left.

It remains impossible to gather concrete and independently confirmable information about conditions in the reclusive country, or about the fate of refugees who are repatriated. But aid officers working in China estimate that half of those forcibly repatriated are sent to labour camps. Others are simply placed under surveillance.

It's estimated that North Korea has about 200 labour camps around the country. Survivors have told aid workers that there were usually a couple of hundred prisoners at their respective camps at any given time. And according to refugees interviewed in China, growing numbers of repatriated North Koreans are being executed--refugees told one South Korean NGO worker about three mass executions involving 50 people that are said to have occurred in the last six months.

Kwang, a North Korean border-control guard who fled and is now hiding near Yanji, says children aren't sent to labour camps "because no child would be strong enough to survive it." Instead, he says, they are beaten when repatriated to discourage them from attempting to cross again. In North Korean cities close to China, parentless children are commonly spotted roaming the streets scavenging for food. Women are sent to separate camps, where they suffer as brutal a fate as the men.

Kim, the former border guard who was imprisoned, says he was lucky to survive. The camp where he was held was run by the Public Security Ministry. Of the roughly 1,200 inmates when he entered, Kim says only about 25 were still alive when he was released a year later, despite the addition of 100 newcomers each month and average sentences of five to six months. The death rate Kim cites is higher than death rates attributed to other labour camps. But his description of living conditions are similar to those of other camps, where sentences are usually three to six months.

Kim made his first contact with NGO workers in May. His description of life within the gulag system, transcribed by a South Korean aid worker, contains a reference to his terror upon entering the camp: "The gate opened for us with a heavy growl and the world inside the fence was unfolded to us. It was as if a wolf had widened its jaws to devour its prey."

Kim says camp inmates rose typically at 5 a.m. to work in fields. They farmed vegetables and cotton for army officers and their families, labouring until 7 p.m. with no water or rest. He says they worked in teams of three, without oxen--two men strapped into a harness filled that role with another walking behind to guide the plough. If any of the men worked too slowly or raised their heads too high, they were beaten. Says Kim: "Getting beaten only two or three times a day was a lucky day."

If the guards decided that a prisoner had not kept up with the fast pace of work, he was fed just two or three spoonfuls of gruel and told to sit with his legs beneath him and his hands behind his back during the night. If he couldn't find the strength to rise in the morning, rations were withheld altogether and he usually died within five days. "But that was the purpose," Kim says. "Everyone was intended to die here." He says his augmented diet of frogs and rats is what allowed him to survive his prison sentence.

Park, a government truck driver until he defected to China in 1998, says he once carried 17 inmates to a camp outside Pukching, in South Hamyong province. "They looked very abandoned,"Park says of the 120 prisoners at the camp. "A lot of beatings took place during the ideology struggle sessions and they had injuries all over their bodies--bruises, cuts, plus itching skin diseases."He recalls that their bones were clearly visible.

According to Lt.-Col. Ri, who spent most of his military career in North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, before fleeing to Yanji, there are also between 10 and 12 concentration camps in North Korea for those accused of spying or criticizing the Communist Party line; only a handful of people have ever been released from these. One South Korean source places the number of political prisoners held in the various camps at more than 200,000, close to 1% of the country's population. The number of petty criminals in labour camps remains unknown.

Ri says that a scattering of labour camps has existed for one or two decades, and they were originally detention centres rather than actual camps. They were designed for petty criminals and were worse than ordinary prisons. But in 1995, special labour camps were created when the number of both criminals and defectors grew steadily after the famine hit.

"Before 1995, when rations were in place, there were not many defectors," he says, adding that those who fled North Korea were previously treated as political prisoners and sent to concentration camps or killed. When the rations stopped, the number of people stealing and defecting surged. Prisons were quickly filled.

"Ninety-nine percent of these inmates are not criminals in the real sense," he says. "The crimes they committed were related to their struggle for survival." Friends of his in charge of some camps and others with access gave him details of the camps. "They told me it's awful there, that not a day goes by without someone dying inside."

Ri says he has no knowledge of specific numbers of inmates at the labour camps. But he says he knows of at least one camp, near Chongjin on North Korea's northeast coast, that continually received fresh supplies of workers, drawn from those caught fleeing into China or forcibly repatriated, as well as people caught stealing food. "Without committing crimes, they could not live. Those people that die of starvation are the innocent people." And he adds: "In North Korea, there is no respect for human life at all."

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