HUNGRY young women in North Korean provincial towns are selling their bodies to Communist party apparatchiks for food, according to reliable witnesses who have recently returned to neighbouring China.

Prostitution — long associated with the national shame of “comfort women” enslaved by imperial Japan — is back as desperate families try to survive Kim Jong-il’s nuclear standoff with the outside world.

The women beckoning from the shadows show that Kim’s totalitarian rule is beginning to disintegrate. They come out on the streets in the evening and overtly lure older men who enjoy party privileges and access to food, the travellers said.

Abandoning Korea’s strict Confucian sexual morality, the women take customers to apartments or hotel rooms available only to officials, and the police do nothing to enforce the law.

The regime has also given up trying to stop private traders setting up stalls at crossroads selling pastries, nuts, snacks and beer.

North Korean officials evade questions about this breakdown in the party’s Stalinist economic theology, preferring to talk about Kim’s “market reforms”, which were meant to introduce wage and price mechanisms but instead brought chaos on top of misery.

“There is no economy,” said a senior aid official. “This is a developed country that has become undeveloped.”

The regime, awaiting international food aid and the next harvest, is now at the bottom of its annual trough in food supplies, just as it orchestrates to a crescendo the crisis over its nuclear weapons.

The tension is expected to come to a head in early September, when talks may open and a group of western nations, plus Japan, will start military exercises to intimidate the dictator.

Kim’s regime, for its part, will put on a belligerent display of armed might today at parades to mark the 50th anniversary of the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean war.

It has also threatened to declare itself a nuclear-armed state if no diplomatic progress is made by September 9, the 55th anniversary of the foundation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

This dangerous countdown was at the core of Tony Blair’s talks in Japan, South Korea and China, where senior western sources last week outlined a “twin track” policy combining the promise of talks with the threat of coercion by air, sea and land forces.

“It’s part hostage situation and part blackmail,” said a western diplomat involved in negotiations with the North Koreans. “You have to show them the threat as well as the inducement to good behaviour. Once the dealing starts, of course, then it’s high risk.”

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