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“I myself almost died three times,” Mr. Kang said Friday before speaking at a conference on North Korean human rights in Toronto.

“I remember burying with my own hands about 300 prison inmates.”

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For most Koreans, Taekwondo is a competitive sport or maybe a source of vigorous exercise, despite its origins as a “martial” art.

In the North Korean prison camps where An Myeong Chul worked for eight years as one of the system’s feared, ruthless guards, it was a weapon of subjugation.

“I remember practising Taekwondo on the prisoners,” Mr. An said in an interview Friday. “It was a way to control the inmates. For instance, if we had a high-ranking official visiting the prison camp, we would be told to show what we’ve learned and practise on an inmate, practise Taekwondo on the inmate.”

The brutal system he served so loyally for years eventually turned on him and his family, and the guard escaped the country just as he was about to be thrown among the prisoners himself.

Now, Mr. An is one of the survivors of North Korea’s vast gulag – said to hold about 150,000 people – who campaign against human rights abuses that they witnessed first-hand, and on a vast scale. Three survivors spoke at a conference in Toronto this week, organized by the Council for Human Rights in North Korea.

Most of the defectors are ex-prisoners; Mr. An offers a rarely heard voice from the other side of a prison network considered as merciless as those of Stalinist Russia or Maoist China.