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...
