Pyongyang's Man In Harare

For 30 years, Robert Mugabe has idolized north Korea's Stalinist leadership. Predictably, the two nations now share the same disastrous fate. R.W. Johnson examines this unholy relationship. Johnson is emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and Southern Africa correspondent for the British Sunday Times. This article appeared in Canada's National Post this week.

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.