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Pyongyang's
man in Harare
RW Johnson, National Post (Canada)
August 11, 2007
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=038f108a-cc44-4e85-a25f-c32c16736b3e
Visitors to the offices
of high-ranking officials in Robert Mugabe's beleaguered government
in recent weeks have noticed the same book open for study: Juche!
The Speeches and Writings of Kim Il Sung. "Some may actually
believe this stuff, but it's more that they want to understand where
the President is coming from," one insider told me.
It appears that
those who have become anxious about Mugabe's Canute-like attempt
to order inflation of 7,000% to be halved and to subordinate the
economy in general to his political will, is not just acting wildly.
He has a model: North Korea's Great Leader who, though he died in
1994, is still enshrined in that country's constitution as "president
for eternity." (To this day, the current ruler, his son Kim
Jong-Il, never actually uses the title of president.) Receiving
the new North Korean ambassador in May this year, Mugabe told him
that North Korea had been a guiding light and friend ever since
it began to aid his ZANU guerrilla army, Zanla, in the 1970s, and
that "everything in Zimbabwe is associated with the exploits
of president Kim Il Sung."
Because Joshua Nkomo's
rival ZAPU movement was aligned with South Africa's African National
Congress during this period, and thus with the orthodox Moscow-led
Soviet bloc, ZANU perforce had to find its foreign funders and arms-suppliers
elsewhere, in Beijing and Pyongyang. This was a rare breakthrough
for Kim Il Sung, so when Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, it
immediately became North Korea's most ambitious diplomatic objective.
Hundreds of North Korean military advisers arrived, not only training
but equipping much of Mugabe's army, particularly the notorious
Fifth Brigade. Indeed, for a few years North Korea even dreamt of
emulating the Cuban model. From its Zimbabwean base, it deployed
over 3,000 troops helping the Angolan, Mozambican and Ethiopian
governments.
What particularly appealed
to Mugabe, however, was that the North Koreans were not only experts
in martial arts but in the far blacker art of political indoctrination,
having honed their skills in the notorious "brain-washing"
of U.S. and British prisoners in the Korean War. The essential principle
was that if, by physical torture, isolation and relentless humiliation,
you could break down someone's personality, it was then possible
to re-mould it along more "acceptable" lines.
The full horror of such
techniques, first glimpsed in Zanla's liberation war tactics, was
fully revealed only in the mid-1980s when Mugabe ordered the Fifth
Brigade to repress political opposition in the Matabeleland region.
Using North Korean terminology, Mugabe explained that "The
people there had their chance and they voted as they did. The situation
there has to be changed. The people must be re-oriented."
Some 20,000 people died
in the resulting campaign of torture and murder, but it was not
just repression pure and simple. What the villagers grew to fear
most was the dreadful all-night singing sessions in which they would
have to sing ZANU songs with cheerful enthusiasm at the same time
that they were savagely beaten; when they would not only have to
watch as friends or family members were tortured or shot but would
themselves have to assist in the process -- the emphasis always
being on achieving their utter humiliation and incrimination so
that they could re-emerge at the end as Mugabe loyalists.
One great focus
of such loyalty would be the pilgrimage to Heroes Acre, the 140-acre
site in the capital of Harare, which commemorates the heroes of
the liberation war. Its huge granite obelisk and Stalinist architecture
were North Korean-designed, such monuments being a regime speciality.
(Kim Il Sung erected over 34,000 monuments to himself.)
Kim first announced
his philosophy of Juche ("self-reliance") in 1972, whereafter
North Korea cut itself off from almost all foreign trade and defaulted
on all its foreign debts -- steps which Zimbabwe has now emulated.
According to Juche, "man is the master
of everything and decides everything," and the most important
work of "revolution and construction is moulding people ideologically
as good Communists with absolute loyalty to the Party and Leader."
Kim had realized that
to achieve this, he needed to isolate North Korea from all outside
influences --crimes such as singing a South Korean pop song or reading
a foreign newspaper carry a life sentence. Kim would have strongly
approved of Mugabe's recent expulsion of foreign media, his crackdown
on the independent press and his slavish broadcast outlets. Indeed,
Mugabe's Herald newspaper has carried laudatory articles about Juche.
After independence, Mugabe was at first prime minister. But his
first visit to North Korea had an enormous impact on him. "He
came back almost a different man," one of his former party
stalwarts told me. "He was tremendously impressed by the stadiums
full of people doing mass callisthenics and colour displays spelling
out Kim's name or even depicting his face. He came back wanting
to change the constitution so that he could become president, like
Kim."
Nicolae Ceaucescu,
the Romanian dictator, was similarly affected by his visit to Pyongyang,
and returned to Bucharest to launch his "systematization"
program, knocking down old buildings and churches in order to build
marching lines of apartments,
North Korean style. Mugabe and Ceaucescu became close to one another
so that the downfall and assassination of the Ceaucescus in 1989
were a trauma in Harare, and all news of the event was snatched
off TV screens. The fall of Cambodia's Pol Pot, who had also embraced
Juche, was similarly unwelcome news in Harare.
When Kim, the Great Leader,
died in 1994, the Gregorian calendar was abolished in North Korea,
and a new calendar installed in which Year One is 1912 (Kim's year
of birth), and in which the first day is April 15, Kim's birthday.
Zimbabwe set up its own Committee to Honour the Memory of Kim Il
Sung, chaired by Vice-President Joseph Msika. This holds a special
month of mourning for Kim every year, with lectures, seminars and
a memorial service "praying for his eternity."
The birthday of Kim's
son, Kim Jong-Il, "the dear leader," is effectively celebrated
as the North Korean Christmas: he is "the central brain,"
"a genius of 10,000 talents" and "the morning star."
Mugabe, whose birthday
(Feb. 21) falls only five days later, has now copied this: He too
is celebrated as "our dear leader" with the same mass
synchronized dancing by women in traditional dress and army parades.
Feasts are also staged--even though, as in North Korea, the faithful
celebrants are often near starvation.
"The central idea
is also the same: Everything, including the economy, can be commanded
and made to fall into line with the Leader's will," one close
Mugabe-watcher told me. "In North Korea, anyone unable to live
with that ended up in the gulag or fled as refugees to China, so
you ended up with a country where everyone left was totally obedient.
This is undoubtedly Mugabe's model." In both countries, regimes
starting out as Marxist have both ended up as apostles of extreme
monarchical authority.
Juche, like Mugabe's
radical socialism, was a fraud. In reality, North Korea depended
utterly on Soviet aid, just as liberated Zimbabwe's economy depended
completely on a few thousand white farmers. When Soviet aid ceased
in 1991, North Korea's income halved and mass starvation ensued,
just as it has in Zimbabwe following the eviction of the white farmers.
Anywhere up to three million North Koreans died, but Kim Jong-Il
simply denied the facts of starvation and at first turned away food
aid. Mugabe did exactly the same. When the World Food Programme
offered to help Zimbabwe's starving in 2004, he asked "Why
foist this food upon us? We do not want to be choked, we have enough."
In the end, both regimes have become massively dependent on foreign
food aid.
This week, Zimbabwe's
Parliament faces Mugabe's proposed constitutional amendment enabling
him to choose his own successor and impose him without an election.
This, too, exactly imitates the way in which Kim Il Sung designated
his own successor; and it allowed Kim to continue to be celebrated
long after his death.
But there is something
else to which Mugabe might pay heed. Although Kim Jong-Il declared
three years of mourning for his father, spent nearly $1-billion
on his mausoleum and declared two national flowers for the country,
Kimilsungia and Kimjongilia, his father's death from a heart attack
and "heavy mental strains" followed a bitter argument
with his son and is still clouded with suspicion. Kim Jong-Il would
not allow doctors to enter his father's room till long after the
death. And all the doctors, as well as his father's bodyguards,
were immediately killed in a series of helicopter "accidents."
Other functionaries who had been close to his father all quickly
disappeared without trace.
So while North Koreans
are encouraged to believe that Kim Il Sung still rules and watches
over the country, it seems likely that the great man's end was more
like the usual tyrant's exit.
* RWJohnson
is emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and Southern Africa
correspondent for the Sunday Times.
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