Mick Hartley

RW Johnson on Mugabe’s inspiration (via David Thompson):

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.