Posted on 09/24/2010 6:50:16 PM PDT by george76
A fierce battle is being waged behind the scenes for control of North Korea as Kim Jong-il prepares to anoint his successor, it has emerged.
Factional in-fighting has broken out between Chang Song-taek, the rogue state's second-in-command, and a group of senior reform-minded officials... Chang has recently seen his hardline views being challenged by a group of reformists, bent on opening up the North Korean economy to Chinese-style capitalism.
The split in the Workers' Party, which echoes the division in the Chinese Communist party between hardliners and reformists during the 1970s and 1980s, may have prompted the recent two-week delay of the first party conference for nearly 45 years...
The in-fighting could also explain Moscow's bleak assessment of relations between North and South Korea, with Alexei Borodavkin, the deputy foreign minister, saying on Thursday: "Tensions on the Korean Peninsula could not be any higher. The only next step is a conflict."
Kim Jong-un, with China's support, would eventually be appointed to lead the country. "North Korea does not want to be economically-dependent on China, and they want to break the umbilical cord, but Beijing has groomed Kim Jong-un, so it will be hard,"
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Change a few names around and one would think the article was about the USA.
Comparing the USA to a genocidal kook state........nice one.
I thought the Russian assessment of the situation was a tad late however it appears there is new information to support concern about the government’s instability.
Hell, all the shots might be fired within North Korea’s borders...
“A fierce battle is being waged behind the scenes for control of North Korea as Kim Jong-il prepares to anoint his successor...”
If a guy has a name like Kim, does this qualify as a cat fight?
It would be a mistake to take too little notice of the word crown. Once one realizes that North Korea's Marxist revolution has degenerated into nothing more than a brutal absolute monarchy events on the Korean peninsula are not a mystery. Kim and his oligarchy are not fools and all of their seemingly random acts of violence are likely carefully planned to maintain leverage.
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