Free Republic

N.Korea Demands Rice for ‘Protecting’ South North Korea on Wednesday demanded the South provide it with promised rice aid, apparently oblivious to the international diplomatic tensions it caused by test-firing several missiles only a week ago. The demand came at an inter-Korean ministerial meeting in Busan. North Korea’s Senior Cabinet Counselor Kwon Ho-ung in his keynote speech hailed the impoverished country’s “Songun” or military-first ideology, which he claimed was helping the South protect its security and benefited “a vast majority” of South Koreans. Notable achievements of the Songun policy include Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program and missile tests and mass...

/begin my translation The Coming Collapse of N. Korean Regime [Analysis by Kim Young-hwan, (the author of) 'On N. Korean Democratization'] Ideology and organization greatly weakened, 80% chance of collapse in 10 years[04/08/05 19:42] A scene from Romanian uprising in '89 The prediction of N. Korean collapse was made twice already. The first was in 1989, when communist regimes in Eastern Europe went down in a series, and the second, in 1994, when (N. Korean) president Kim Il-sung died. However, these two predictions had a serious flaw. At the time, N. Korea had few internal factors to cause a collapse....