THE GREAT hunger in North Korea is not like an African famine. There are no pictures of children with distended bellies or bodies lying beside the road. We don't see such evidence, partly because North Korea is as secretive as a cult and hermetically sealed from outsiders.

This makes it difficult to predict whether this communist country of 24 million people can survive, whether it will implode, or whether it will be tempted to invade the, South in a last desperate gamble to preserve its system.

No one doubts that there is a serious humanitarian disaster in the making. But "it doesn't register visually", said a diplomat in Beijing. The only television network permitted to visit the capital Pyongyang is CNN, the obvious medium to alert the world, but it has not been allowed to take its cameras into the countryside.

For confirmation that hunger is stalking the land, outsiders have to rely on amateur videos from aid agencies like the World Food Programme, and on the eyewitness accounts of Chinese traders and people like Ms Kathi Zellweger, of Caritas.

The Swiss born director for international cooperation for the Catholic aid agency, who recently made her 10th visit to North Korea in two years, said yesterday that she saw children in kindergartens who were too weak to stand up and who were showing signs of malnutrition that were not evident on her last visit in December.

"Every time I go I feel I'm stepping down a ladder a few steps more but I don't know where the bottom is," said Ms Zellweger, who is convinced that North Korea is facing a major disaster if there is no help forthcoming in the next few weeks. "People were mixing grass, edible herbs and bark into their tiny ration of rice and maize. There are more children in the street, which means they are being sent home from school."

Visitors are escorted everywhere but the telltale signs of a crisis cannot all be hidden. A Beijing based diplomat who visited the country two weeks ago said that on a drive from Pyongyang to Kaesong in the south the fourlane highway was lifeless strip of concrete with almost no traffic. In the cities there were few cars and even fewer bicycles. "Close to the border I saw plenty of uniformed men with automatic weapons," he said. "The country is on a war footing but, then, it always has been."

This appears to be a famine with socialist characteristics: there is very little food but it is being shared around, even if it is only 100 g to 450 g a day. World Food Programme officials discount stories of cannibalism, though a recent visitor said: "There are clearly places where nobody can go, where things are as bad as can be." The children suffering the most "don't look desperately ill but they get so internally weakened that they get sick and die".

On the other hand, many people are still fit and well enough to perform on cue in the set piece occasions in which North Korea excels. When Mike Chinoy, CNN's Hong Kong bureau chief, was invited to Pyongyang last week to cover the 85th anniversary celebrations of the birth of the late Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, he found the leadership could still mobilise 300,000 or 400,000 people who did not look in bad shape and tens of thousands of soldiers who gave a display of precision marching.

SUCH scenes do not support the theory that the famine translates into immediate political danger for the system, and that the last Stalinist nation is about to implode. The dynamic of the famine is different from the African version, when countries like Somalia simply fell apart. Here the elite appears to be hanging together.

"The message I got was `We're hungry and poor but proud and don't mess with us', " said a recent Hong Kong based visitor to the capital, who concluded that it was "excruciatingly hard for them to acknowledge that anything has gone wrong.

History shows that doctrinaire communist leaders of this century - Stalin and Mao, for example - can tolerate a famine of epic proportions rather than make reforms in the beloved system. Kim Jong Il, son and successor of Kim Il Sung, may be of the same iron mould. He appeared in the flesh before a western TV crew last week for the first time, and looked more relaxed and jaunty than his image as a deranged megalomaniac would have indicated.

The North Korean leadership will not acknowledge that the system is at fault, blaming the disastrous floods of the last two years which destroyed the crops, but they do admit that they need food aid badly. So what are they up to? It is a guessing game for analysts but a definite strategy can be discerned.

Rather than making promises of reform, Kim Jong Il has wrung concessions from the west by posing as a rogue elephant. "It's like `help me or I'll shoot myself'," said a US observer. Negotiations with the United States have actually produced promises of food aid, recognition and an agreement to provide two nuclear power plants, in return for not developing nuclear weapons.

By promoting generals and catering to the military the new leader constantly plays his strongest card the prospect of a war with the South. This has been lent credibility by dire warnings in the South Korean press attributed to Pyongyang's highest ranking defector, Hwang Jang Yop, but sounding suspiciously like a press release from the South Korean security services, that the North plans to unify the peninsula by "obliterating the South".

Whether it tries depends in part on bow South Korea handles the crisis in the coming days. "If the North feels that the South is trying to put its foot on the North's neck, then it's not impossible, but it's not likely," one Koreawatcher said. "Their strategy seems to be to stay intact, to survive, and to get outside help."

The South, 10 times richer than its Northern neighbour, has little stomach, or sufficient resources, to apply the German solution, a take over of the communist half of the country. Other countries in the region, like Japan, worry that a unified Korea would make common cause against Tokyo, its former occupier. China sustains the status quo by providing food aid to Pyongyang while not encouraging peace talks between North and South.

Talks which have been taking place in Beijing between the Red Cross organisations of North and South Korea were suspended yesterday while the South determines the amount of food aid it will give, according to North Korea's Red Cross secretary general, Mr Paek YongHo. South Korea has promised $6 million of the total requested by the World Food Programme.

This week South Korea, the US and Japan will meet in Tokyo to discuss how to respond to the looming humanitarian disaster in a country which still treats them as the enemy. At stake is not just the fate of a starving people, but the stability of the Asia Pacific region.