In Foreign Parts: From gulag to brothels for taste of the good life

The defector from North Korea invited me to the brothel. Mr Chung wanted to show me the "good life" that some from Asia's forgotten refugee crisis occasionally enjoy. "I have my North Korean wife, but for pleasure, I used to come to South Korean women," he confided. "When I went to a brothel in Seoul for the first time, I thought: this was the feeling of capitalism."

Bizarrely, for Mr Chung, escape from the gulags of North Korea to the South has been something of a comedown. He is from a top military family; his mother was one of Pyongyang's most celebrated architects. Education for Mr Chung was at the Eton of North Korea. He vividly remembers the capriciousness of tyranny. "The 'Dear Leader', Kim Jong Il, went there and like him, all the students were utterly spoilt. On your birthday, you could choose the menu of the day. If you wanted whale meat, then whale meat you would have. We paid no attention to the people starving outside."

He fell from grace after his eldest brother defected to South Korea. The entire family was exiled to a remote mining town for seven years. Another of his brothers was shot dead simply for planning to escape. Eventually, money changed hands and the Chungs were whisked away to Seoul.

They are the lucky ones. In South Korea I also met Mr Kim, a twentysomething trainee car mechanic who was caught after crossing from North Korea into China. Beijing is an old ally of the Pyongyang regime and regularly hands back refugees, to imprisonment and possible execution.

Mr Kim was sent to a labour camp for 11 months with 22 other people. Only two of them survived. "During the bitterly cold weather," he told me, "the bodies of those who'd starved, frozen or been worked to death were piled on carts, and soon covered in snow. But the spring sunshine melted this, revealing the extent of the previous winter's tragedy – dozens of corpses with their flesh falling off the bone – grim pickings for the crows." There are documented testimonies that babies born to women in prison camps were routinely fed to dogs. One man recalled that nothing in affluent South Korea had tasted better than the first rat he trapped and ate in a North Korean labour camp, such was his hunger.

And the sheer madness of dictatorship lingers in memories. Each house is obliged to display pictures of Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung. If any are found damaged or dirty, the family can be jailed for six months. Banknotes bearing the Dear Leader's image are rolled, not folded, so not to damage the great man's face. Fear has a terrifying triviality, where power is absolute.

The numbers tell their own story. Three years ago, a few more than 300 North Koreans fled to South Korea. That number doubled for the next two years and so far this year nearly 300 have made it to Seoul. That puts the government there in a bind. They back the so-called Sunshine Policy of engagement with the North. But the refugees with their horror stories make engagement look increasingly as though it is appeasement.

If the refugees are an embarrassment to South Korea, as far as British and US policy is concerned, they expose a cruel cynicism. North Korea was named by George Bush, with Iraq and Iran, as lying on an "axis of evil". But a "shock and awe" solution seems unthinkable, even though, by dint of its human rights record alone, North Korea is a far worthier candidate for regime change than even Iraq.

One Western aid worker said: "Who cares about Korean refugees? Mr Bush and Mr Blair are deaf to the screams from the world's most nightmarish gulag. Silence kills."

Christopher Gunness reports from Seoul on BBC Radio Four's "Crossing Continents" on Thursday, 24 April at 11am.