By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING, Jan 2 (IPS) - Asked by an aid worker how many people had died from famine in her hometown, a North Korean survivor said: ''So many people are dead that I can't figure out the number.''
The North Korean woman added that since food distribution was suspended in March 1996, she had received food aid only twice, in March and August 1997. So ''when I had my first meal in China, I couldn't help my tears as I thought of my children in North Korea,'' she told her interviewers.

''If I can go back to my home safe with food and clothes, we will survive for a certain period. If I fall and get caught by the police, my children will die from hunger. I get desperate when I imagine this situation. I have no place to go,'' she said.

The woman was among 204 North Korean refugees interviewed recently by Korean-Chinese associates of a South Korean humanitarian organisation, called the Korean Buddhist Sharing Movement, to get a clearer picture of problems in the Stalinist country.

The survey provides a grievous glimpse into conditions in the isolated north-east region of North Korea, which is most severely affected by famine conditions persisting for three years now.

As the country goes through one of the worst famines of the 20th century, survivors tell of tales of desperation as the country of 24 million people faces another bleak year.

Food refugees say they had to sell furniture in order to buy good, or resorted to stealing or begging if needed. They wandered the North Korean countryside looking for food, while some ate the peels of pine and the roots of rice plants.

In the end, many crossed the North Korean-Chinese border hoping to find some food and now continue to hide in China's border region of Yanbian in Jilin province, north of North Korea. Two refugees staying in China admitted to having eaten dead bodies to survive.

''We ate wild plants in summer and nuts in fall,'' related one 55-year-old female survivor, who had lost her husband to tuberculosis and her granddaughter to malnutrition.

''Adults could eat everything and digest them, but children couldn't and vomited. When they cried in hunger, I stole some potatoes and unripe beans for them,'' she explained.

The collapse of its planned economy and agricultural collecties, combined with natural disasters and collapsed harvests, have devastated North Korea, causing the deaths from hunger and disease of as many as one million people, according to some accounts.

Despite major campaigns for assistance, the international community has largely reacted cautiously to pleas for food and medical aid, fearing these might be used to prop up the military strength of the belligerent North Korean government instead of its suffering citizens.

''At the end of the twentieth century, this unprecedented mass starvation is rapidly developing all over the North Korea,'' said a petition signed by leaders of the Korean Buddhist Sharing Movement and seven other South Korean non-government organisations.

The petition says food refugees who have crossed the border into China to get some food amounted to ''thousands'' of people. They live in fear of being caught by the Chinese government and returned to North Korea, as has happened in the past. Some 66 percent of the interviewees said they felt ''unsafe'' about their hiding place.

Many told researchers that they considered China ''so well off'' and expressed hope that Chinese aid and goodwill would be repaid if its people helped North Koreans in their hour of need. But others said ''we will be better off than China if we unify''.

The toll of years of famine has been high. The 204 interviewees who gave information on 1,009 family members, including themselves, reported the death of 245 relatives, or 24 percent, in the past two years.

Some 63 percent of the refugees' relatives who died perished from starvation, and diseases such as tuberculosis and paratyphus accounted for another 29 percent of the death toll.

Children and the elderly had succumbed the easiest to starvation and illness. Refugees said starvation accounted for 90 percent of the deaths among children up to the age of nine, and nearly half of the all deaths reported were among family members aged 50 or older.

Ven Pomnyun, executive secretary of the Korean Buddhist Sharing Movement, said his group decided to undertake the survey because of the divergence in the accounts of the food situation in North Korea. ''We would like to know how much the North Koreans are actually suffering,'' he said in a statement.

While travelers to the border regions have come back with horrific stories of mass starvation and even cannibalism, some United Nations envoys and officials from some aid organisations who visited the country on organised trips have denied reports of widespread starvation.

''Although the cause of this problem is North Korea, for not revealing its true data publicly, the world, particularly South Korea and United States, have been overlooking at this tragedy because of political reasons,'' argued the eight South Korean NGOs in their petition.

''We send a plea to those leaders of the world with conscience,'' the groups said. ''We ought to avoid mass starvation whatever the (political) conditions may be.''

But on Thursday, the North Korean government said the worst of the food crisis was over, with state-run newspapers saying the country has ''successfully overcome the 'arduous' march and made a breakthrough for fresh progress''. Pyongyang refers to its food crisis as the ''arduous march''. (END/IPS/AP-DV/AB/JS/97)