金九(피살), 金奎植(납북), 李厚洛(숙청), 張世東(투옥), 朴哲彦(투옥), 金宇中(파산. 투옥), 鄭夢憲(자살), 서경원(투옥), 林東源(투옥), 朴智元(투옥), 盧武鉉(자살), 鄭東泳(낙선), 金大中(對北송금 사건 탄로됨), 鄭周永, 徐東權, 朴槿惠, 文鮮明. 차우셰스쿠, 무가베 등.

위의 명단은 김일성, 김정일과 의미 있는 만남을 가졌던 사람들이다. 김일성과 김정일을 만나고 돌아온 뒤의 운명이 나빠진 경우가 많다. 피살 1명, 납북 1명, 자살 2명, 투옥 5명, 숙청 파산 낙선 탄로 각1명.

이런 운명의 變轉(변전)은 우연일까? 惡運(악운)의 비율이 너무 높은 데는 이유가 있지 않을까? 이런 추정을 하게 만든다.

1. 김일성, 김정일은 惡黨(악당)이다. 종교적으론 惡靈(악령)이다. 둘이서 죽인 人命이 약700만 명이니 惡魔級(악마급)이다. 이런 인간을 이용하여 자신의 목표를 달성하겠다는 계산을 갖고 그를 만나는 순간 惡靈의 영향권안에 들어가 속고 이용만 당한다.

2. 그를 만나러 평양에 간다는 것 자체가 그의 무대에 올라가든지 그가 판 함정에 빠지는 셈이다. 惡黨이 조종하기 좋은 상황으로 걸어들어가면 이용당한다. 김구, 김규식이 그런 경우이다.

3. 김일성, 김정일을 만난 사람들은 대체로 두 가지 감정을 갖는다. 두려움-한국으로 돌아와서 그를 비판하지 못하게 한다. 친근감-일단 만나 인간적으로 대화한 독재자를 비판하는 것은 의리상 맞지 않다는 생각에 빠진다. 이런 자세가 국민들에겐 이상하게 보인다. 김정일과 김일성만 만나고 돌아오면 사람이 달라진다는 評(평)이 생긴다.

4. 李厚洛, 朴哲彦의 경우처럼 對北밀사役을 국내에서 정치적으로 활용하려 들면 질투하는 사람들이 생겨 견제를 받는다.

5. 김일성은 차우셰스쿠와 무가베도 망쳤다. 김일성을 만난 두 독재자는 김일성식 우상숭배를 부러워하게 되었고 돌아와선 독재를 더 강화하였다. 그 결과 차우셰스쿠는 민중혁명을 만나 처형되었고 무가베는 좋은 환경을 가진 짐바브웨를 북한식으로 다스리다가 세계에서 가장 가난한 나라를 만들었다.

6. 이념무장이 부족한 민주국가의 정치인이 전체주의 독재자를 만나서 담판하면 불리해진다. 이는 월급장이 사장이 재벌의 오너를 만날 때 눌리는 기분이 드는 것과 비슷하다. 임기가 있는 민주국가의 정치인이 쓸 수 있는 카드는 제한적인데, 임기가 없는 독재자는 무궁무진하다. 원천적으로 불리한 게임이다.

*결론: 대한민국의 대통령이 평양으로 찾아가서 김정일이나 그 후계자를 만나는 것은 절대로 피해야 할 일이다. 李明博 대통령이 이 일 하나만 하지 않아도 퇴임 후가 안전할 것이다. 1938년 뮨헨 회담에서 惡黨 히틀러에게 속아 넘어가 체코를 나치독일에 넘겨주는 결정을 하였던 獨, 英, 伊, 佛의 지도자 4명은 6년 이내에 모조리 자살, 피살, 急死(실각), 몰락하였다.

히틀러는 자살, 이탈리아의 무솔리니는 피살, 영국 수상 챔버레인은 2차 대전 발발 후 밀려난 뒤 急死, 달라디에(프랑스 수상)는 프랑스 항복 후 투옥되었다. 악마급 독재자는 타협의 대상이 아니라 제거 대상일 뿐이다.

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Pyongyang's man in Harare

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.

By National PostAugust 11, 2007Be the first to post a comment

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 stagedeven 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.