June 9, 2001	atimes.com

The Koreas PYONGYANG WATCH Out of Africa By Aidan Foster-Carter Asia as such used not to be especially important for North Korea. Initially, the communist bloc and above all the USSR were Kim Il-sung's prime orientations - as befits a man who came home not just with the Red Army but in their uniform. Then came the Sino-Soviet dispute. Kim neatly and uniquely stayed neutral, but leaned more to Mao - until Red Guards called him a "fat revisionist". Pyongyang backed the Soviet line on Afghanistan, yet it fiercely criticized Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia. Moscow kept funding its maverick protege. Even Mikhael Gorbachev did, until he got fed up and pulled the plug in 1990 - recognizing South Korea to add insult to injury. Long before that, in the 1960s, North Korea's identification shifted towards the third world. It set great store by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) (which still exists; though in the post-Cold War era, what exactly are they non-aligned about?), opposing the efforts of Cuba to have the NAM side with Moscow. And it gleefully blocked Seoul's bid to join the movement - on the not unreasonable grounds that 37,000 US troops might be construed as alignment. Within the NAM, Pyongyang's efforts focused less on Asia than far-off Africa. The full story of North Korea in Africa has yet to be told. Having lived and travelled in Africa in those days, believe me: they were everywhere. Just about every country had an embassy, pressing the works of the Great Leader on all who wanted (and many who didn't). They did more useful things too, like offering medical training in Tanzania and aid for farming in Guinea. And less useful: building and gilding dozens of statues for wannabe Great Leaders such as Etienne Eyadema in Togo (who didn't have to be left-leaning; far from it); and training troops such as Zimbabwe's murderous Fifth Brigade, who massacred thousands in the 1980s. South Korea tried to compete too - though self-styled progressive states such as Tanzania and Zimbabwe actually refused to recognize South Korea. Conversely, Pyongyang's pitch was as a role model: an anti-imperialist that was really going places. Many Africans agreed, seeing a dynamic state with its spotless capital city as the tight ship to which they too aspired. Kim Il-sung, who hated travel, in 1975 visited Algeria and (for no known reason) Mauretania. How very long ago those days now seem. By the 1980s a failing economy forced Pyongyang to retreat, leaving the field to Seoul. The few North Korean missions that remain in Africa are reduced to smuggling ivory to make ends meet. Even before that there were snafus. The memorable recent jibe about Kim Jong-il - "tactical genius, strategic fool" - by Robert Manning of the US Council on Foreign Relations goes way back. In 1975, Pyongyang's support for Mobutu in the then Zaire put it alongside of apartheid South Africa in Angola, where Mobutu's allies fought the Cuban-backed MPLA. (In the 1960s, Che Guevara had slipped into Zaire incognito to assist Mobutu's guerrilla opponents.) Ironically, the road to the capital Luanda was controlled by two North Korean 130mm long-barrel cannons - one of which exploded at first use while the other misfired, killing or maiming their crew and handing victory to the MPLA. Strange indeed are the twists of the dialectic. (The tale is told by an eyewitness: the chief of the CIA's Angola task force, John Stockwell, in his 1978 book In Search of Enemies. One of the first CIA renegades to go public, Stockwell has another criticism of his ex-employer: its failure to place or turn an agent in Pyongyang.) Angola/Zaire is one reason why, despite now being the planet's last redoubts of old-style communism, North Korea and Cuba have never been close. Geography is another. Latin America is as far as you can go from Korea, and most of it has been too rightwing to be amenable to the DPRK - although Brazil recently opened relations. Even where it did gain a toehold, Pyongyang blotted its copy book: training leftist Mexican rebels in the 1960s, and in 1977 shutting its mission in Argentina without notice (it did the same in Australia). A rare and ominous Latin admirer is Peruvian populist politician Alan Garcia - now running for president again, despite the chaos he created last time - to whom the elderly Kim Il-sung once discoursed at length on the need for tricontinental struggle and his pride in being an Asian. Did Pyongyang gain from all this? Even Africans who admired Kim Il-sung tired of hearing so much about him, finding the DPRK self-centered to the point of solipsism (that's juche for you). In a future article, we'll see if North Korea's record on its own continent suggests it has learned from experience. ((c)2001 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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