North Korea's regime has tightened controls on outside information amid growing popular revolts against despots in the Arab world, South Korean sources and officials say. But analysts say the Kim family is expected to retain its decades-long iron grip on power, in the absence of Internet access and a lack of institutions around which any revolt could coalesce. “The regime appears to be taking (Middle East democratic movements) seriously. It is now trying hard to stop it from spilling over into the country,” Yonhap news agency Thursday quoted a Seoul official as saying. The hardline communist state has recently strengthened ideological control over its people and further tightened its blockade of outside information, the unidentified official said. The South's Unification Minister Hyun In-Taek said in a Yonhap interview this week he expects the North to take steps to stop the turmoil spilling over to its 24 million people. “I think the core of the leadership knows of the situation and sees it. From that viewpoint, it will obviously make efforts to keep the regime from being negatively influenced,” Hyun said. “I believe the North Korean people have yet to learn of the facts (about the Mideast) because the North's television does not report on them and the people can't use the Internet,” the minister said. “For now, the direct impact on the people will not be big.” The Daily NK, a Seoul-based Internet newspaper, said special riot squads have been set up in response to turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa. Following a decree from leader Kim Jong-Il, the squads are working to track down any hints of unrest, it quoted a source inside the country as saying. In recent years there have been reports of sporadic small-scale protests against food shortages and other hardships, after hundreds of thousands of people died in a famine in the 1990s. US aid groups have warned that the country is facing a severe food shortage again with people reduced to searching for wild grass to eat. There were reports of protests especially following a disastrous currency revaluation in 2009. But the regime weathered the collapse of communism in Europe in the early 1990s and the cut-off of Soviet aid. And defectors and analysts say chances of a major revolt now are slim. “At present, there is little possibility of a revolution because, unlike Egypt and Libya, North Korea completely controls outside information,” defector Jang Jin-Seong told a forum in Seoul.
