Word: kim
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...decision to cut off U.S. food aid has angered some officers, sources say. A chunk of that aid was diverted by the military for sale in private markets, which have become increasingly important in feeding the population. So halting aid not only risks another humanitarian disaster in the North - Kim presided over a famine that killed nearly a million North Koreans in the 1990s - but also reduces corrupt officers' incomes...
...detestable regime, the possibility discomfits some South Koreans. Reeling from the global economic crisis, they aren't sure they can afford sudden reunification. And it absolutely petrifies China, which likes having a buffer state not allied with the U.S. between itself and the South. (See pictures of Kim's rise to power...
...Even if Kim dies tomorrow, what will come next in North Korea might not be radically different. "Do not conflate the end of the Kim regime with the end of North Korea as a state," says Andrew Scobell, a political scientist from Texas A&M University, who wrote a paper for the Pentagon last year assessing the North's future. Baek Seung Joo, who watches North Korea at the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis, says, "We have been through a transition before." When Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il's father, died suddenly in 1994, Kim Jong Il succeeded with...
Durability is right. Kim had been in power only a few years when the famine struck, but it didn't shake his grip. Ever since then, China has been pressuring him, unsuccessfully, to reform his economy. Kim has been able to resist such demands partly because North Korea is dynastic, with a cult of personality that is freakishly strong; there are no fewer than 30,000 statues and monuments to the Kim family throughout the country. Kim has three sons from which to choose a successor, and it's now become something of a parlor game among analysts to select...
Jong Un's mother Ko Young Hee, a former dancer, was Kim's third wife. Analysts say that before she died of breast cancer in 2004, she pushed Kim to name one of their two sons as his successor. (Kim's third son is by a different wife.) By 2007, Jong Un and his older brother Kim Jong Chul were enrolled in a program created specifically for them at Kim Il Sung Military University. Kim is said by his former sushi chef, Kenji Fujimoto, who wrote a memoir of his days in the North, to think that Jong Chul...