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Finally, I would like to add a personal word of thanks for your assistance in the matter of deportation. That support – and the excellent co-operation of your officials with their British colleagues – is a tribute to the strength of the bilateral relationship which has grown up between the United Kingdom and Libya. As you know, I am determined to see that partnership develop still further.
Best wishes
yours ever,
Tony
In the summer of 1996, stories began to filter out of Libya about a mass killing in Tripoli's Abu Salim prison. The details remained scarce, and the government initially denied that an incident had taken place. Libyan groups outside the country said up to 1,200 prisoners had died.In 2001 and 2002, Libyan authorities began to inform some families with a relative in Abu Salim that their family-member had died, although they did not provide the body or details on the cause of death. In April 2004 Libyan leader Mu`ammar al-Qadhafi publicly acknowledged that killings had taken place in Abu Salim, and said that prisoners' families have the right to know what took place.[209]
Even these remnants disclose payments of over a million pounds to the WRP from Arab regimes and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The report clearly shows that for nearly a decade the WRP acted, quite literally, as the paid agent of brutal and oppressive foreign powers. This lasted from at least as early as 1975, when the first contact was made with the PLO, until 1983. During this period a series of agreements was concluded with the Libyan regime and the WRP's political perspectives were amended to suit their paymasters.The document alleges that the WRP acted - through Gerry Healy, Alex Mitchell, Corin and Vanessa Redgrave, and a number of others -as a collector of information for Libyan Intelligence. This function had, as the report puts it, "strongly anti-semitic undertones". Put plainly, they were Jew-spotting in the media, politics and business. The Khomeini revolution and the Iran-Iraq war - in which the WRP's efforts to support both sides soon collapsed - put paid to their employment by the regime of Saddam Hussein. But before this disaster the WRP's connections with Iraq clearly generated more than the £19,697 identified in the report.The Iraqi connection had sinister aspects. From 1979 on, the WRP provided the Iraqi embassy with intelligence on dissident Iraqis living in Britain. Since Saddam Hussein's dictatorship does not scruple to arrest the relatives of opponents, to use torture on a vast scale, or even to murder children, it seems likely that the WRP were accomplices to murder.[210]
Drawing recruits from his terrorism camps, Gaddafi trained, armed and dispatched thugs like Charles Taylor and Foday Sankoh to take power in West African countries, initiating the brutal slaughter of innocents in Liberia and Sierra Leone, says David M. Crane, the founding prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. “This was a long-term criminal conspiracy,” says Crane, who is now a professor at Syracuse University, and “[Gaddafi] was the center point.”
Sankoh died in custody after the war ended; Taylor is currently being tried by the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Gaddafi is named in Taylor’s indictment, and Taylor has testified to Gaddafi’s involvement. Crane says he found evidence that when Sankoh invaded Sierra Leone, “Libyan special forces were there helping train and assist them tactically and there were Libyan arms in that invasion: he had been involved from the get go.”
In a statement, Colonel Gaddafi's government said: " Libya is aware of the difference between legitimate revolutionary action and terrorism aimed at civilians and innocent people. This action does not belong to the legitimate revolutionary operation."
He acknowledged the Colonel as a "friend of the IRA", but wouldn't be drawn on whether this relationship is now a "grubby" embarrassment.Instead Mr Adams tried to consign the Gaddafi link to the past and associate republicans with the Arab spring, drawing parallels between the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East and the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s (this mirrored comments made to me by Martin McGuinness back in the early days of the Libyan rebellion).
In August 2008, both countries agreed a Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Co-operation, including provision for bilateral efforts to combat "illegal migration" through joint patrolling of the sea. As part of the treaty, Italy has said it will compensate Libya for its 30-year occupation. The $5bn (£3bn) package involves construction projects, student grants and pensions for Libyan soldiers who served with the Italians during the Second World War. In return, Libya has agreed, amongst other things, to tighten control of its territorial and international waters and accept disembarkation on its soil of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees intercepted at sea by Italian vessels. Italy has been reported to have also undertaken to provide resources, including technology for control of migrant flows through the southern borders of Libya.
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Things have not gone well in Africa for quite a while. the era of colonial freedom which began so optimistically with Ghana in 1957 would soon be captured by Cold War manipulators and skewed into a deadly season of ostensible ideological conflicts which encouraged the emergence of all kinds of evil rulers able to count on limitless supplies of military hardware from their overseas patrons, no matter how atrociously they ruled their peoples.
All of us, therefore, even though pursuing widely contrasting policies in the task of reconstructing our various nation-states, still use “socialism” to describe our respective efforts. ‘The question must therefore be faced: What real meaning does the term retain in the context of contemporary African politics? I warned about this in my book Consciencism (London and New York, 1964, p. 105).And yet, socialism in Africa today tends to lose its objective content in favour of a distracting terminology and in favour of a general confusion. Discussion centres more on the various conceivable types of socialism than upon the need for socialist development
....
There are, however, other African political leaders and thinkers who use the term “socialism” because they believe that socialism would, in the words of Chandler Morse, “smooth the road to economic development”. It becomes necessary for them to employ the term in a “charismatic effort to rally support” for policies that do not really promote economic and social development. Those African leaders who believe these principles are supposed to be the “African socialists”.
The July Budget austerity measures—demanding a 5 per cent deduction from the wages of all those earnings more than NC.336 per annum (the approximate starting wage of most skilled workers) were hardly sufficient in themselves to provoke such stern resistance as was in fact encountered. After declaring their secession from the TUC on the grounds that the TUC had failed to express the true feelings of the working class, the railway workers led their fellow-workers of Sekondi-Takoradi in an illegal strike which lasted seventeen days, in the face of the detention of their leaders and threats of military intervention. The role of the United Party opposition was marginal to the central dynamic and aims of the strike, even if it provided much-needed financial support in the later stages. More important by far was the moral and, in some cases, active support provided by other sections of the Sekondi- Takoradi masses. As one strike-leader put it, 'The support we received from all the people here was so tremendous we could not have backed down even if we had wanted to.' To some degree, this was a matter of other groups—most notably the market women and many of the unemployed—recognising their dependence on the trade, or charity, and hence the financial capacity, of the regular wage-earners. The market women also had their own specific grievances relating to the increasing domination of the market trade by C.P.P. favourites.All these were united by a common sense of resentment at the widen- ing socio-economic and communications gap between the C.P.P. elite and the common people who had brought them to power.[216]
The harder you drive for westernisation, modernisation, the more you create these conflicting forces. And Nkrumah has been driving hard, none harder anywhere. The statistics of economic development in Ghana are the most advanced in Africa. But, given the original conditions, every economic advance means social disruption. To a man in his position it would seem that the only thing to do is to drive on and if to go on means ruthless suppression of opposition, well, history and progress demand it.[217]
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| Krobo Edusei meeting Ben Gurion Prime Minister and founder of Israel |
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| Frida Kahlo with Leon Trotsky in Mexico City |
But more importantly for this list it raises several questions, many longstanding Bolsheviks were arrested, tortured and executed for "Trotskyism" and "Trotsky-fascism" during the period that Kahlo had been a public and active member of the Fourth International and intimate of Leon Trotsky. So there are two ways her inclusion proves problematic, either her open years long Trotskyist deviation should make her an enemy to have been dealt with on par with many other members of the communist movement, or her journey back into Stalin's orbit shows that the vicious and brutal liquidations of many Bolsheviks and foreign communist and socialist advocates was not actually necessary and was just a brutal waste of human life.
Kim il Sung -
The collapse of the ruling socialist parties and the frustration of socialism in the Soviet Union and several East European countries in recent years were mainly due to the fact that officials misused their authority and behaved bureaucratically. This had the result that the parties in these countries lost the support of the popular masses. A party, divorced from the popular masses and forsaken by them, is doomed to collapse. Should this happen, socialism cannot maintain its existence. In the final analysis, bureaucratism does the evil work of destroying the mass basis of the working-class party and undermining the socialist system. The great danger of bureaucracy lies precisely here.[179]
I think here is one of the few people on the list to qualify for both categories without much issue, so well done I guess?
Kim il Sung also meets the requirement for anti-western in the philosophical sense, for example his staunch opposition to mixed gender schools.
Kim il Sung had a policy of separating boys and girls at school, and he prohibited marriage until college graduation. it was late in the 1970s when many students who studied in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe came back and became party officials. they had the opinion that a co-educational system was better and sent up a suggestion to Kim il Sung. Kim il Sung was outraged. he said, "Whose idea was this! They're all revisionists! Fire them and re-educate them!" Subsequently, several members of Science Education Department and Education Committee of the Party Political Bureau were terminated and sent to re-indoctrination.[98]
Its often hard to find reliable information on North Korea due to the secrecy of the government and how many of the sources positive and negative have very obvious political bias's. So I find accounts such as the above which come from Hwang Jang-Yop very interesting. Hwang defected from North Korea in 1997 because he believed that Kim Jong Il was a terrible betrayer of Kim Il Sung and spent his years in exile in South Korea trying to promote Kim Il Sung thought while explaining why Jong Il was an unworthy successor.
He's kinda hard to write off as a cheerleader for US Imperialism.
Il Sung's inclusion on this list is a little eye brow raising because his relationships with the USSR and PRC were very strained to say the least.
By the end of the decade, mentions of Mao almost disappeared from the North Korean press.The sudden worsening of relations between the two countries also resulted in a border conflict: the part of the border between the PRC and the DPRK going through Paektu mountain (called Changbai mountain in China) was unregulated.The Hungarian embassy in Pyongyang reported that China had presented Pyongyang with an ultimatum: approve the border we suggest, or the People’s Liberation Army will take it by force. North Korea had to yield. Notably, Seoul did not recognize the agreement and officially continued to claim the Chinese part of the mountain.In 1967, Kim Il Sung issued his May 25 Instructions, which dramatically tightened control of the country. This age saw the DPRK also begin to falsify history, with expressions of gratitude to Soviet liberators and friends of the People’s Volunteers’ Army of China being replaced by panegyrics to Kim – fitting for the new age of isolation.Chinese citizens in the DPRK fell victims to the new age – just as the Soviet Koreans did a decade earlier. Pyongyang cut them off most of the state-distributed goods – unless they left for China or changed their citizenship to DPR Korean. Very soon, the diaspora vanished nearly completely.
If your looking for a parallel the closest would be Romania, which maintained distance but still had dialogue and economic links with the Soviet Union and China.
North Korea's isolation means it is often dubbed the `Hermit Kingdom` after the old Korean monarchy which tried to completely isolate itself from the outside world before the encroachment of the Japanese and Russian Empires. That isolation was not a feature of Kim Il Sung's regime, North Korea maintained a lot of international links in nearly sphere from diplomacy, economic and military. Many African nations traded extensively with North Korea which is how many buildings of state and sports stadiums were completed. Of course you don't defeat Imperialism with lovely court houses, a lot of the trade and support took the form of arms sales and advisers.
One of the most well known examples of North Korean military support was in Zimbabwe and the training of the Zimbabwean military and its infamous 5th Brigade.
Mugabe agreed with then-North Korean leader Kim Il Sung that Pyongyang would train a wing of Zimbabwe’s army, known as the Fifth Brigade, which would be under the direct control of Mugabe himself as he sought to consolidate his power in the country.[218]
This was unusual as the rest of the army was trained and integrated by British advisers. The 5th Brigade is infamous for a brutal campaign of repression in the south of Zimbabwe during the 1980s, targeting members of the rival national liberation movement the Zimbabwean African People's Union (ZAPU) and the Ndebele ethnic group which made up the majority of ZAPU's members.
[219]The Fifth Brigade was unleashed in Matabeleland North in January 1983, with devastating results. Within weeks, thousands of civilians were massacred in rural villages.The Fifth Brigade was easily identifiable, as they wore red berets, spoke Shona, and drove around in unique Chinese vehicles. They sang revolutionary songs as they travelled and their movement was marked by screaming, gunshots, and the burning of homesteads - this was not the behaviour of an army brigade intent on hunting down small groups of elusive dissidents. This was a brigade with a mandate to terrorise and murder civilians. It was other units from the main body of the army - namely Fourth Brigade, Sixth Brigade, the paratroopers and the Police Support Unit - that carried out a quite separate campaign against the approximately 400 highly dispersed bandits that came to be called dissidents.The Fifth Brigade's modus operandi changed over time, becoming more clandestine as their atrocities began to draw intense criticism from the Catholic Church in particular. They moved from a campaign in 1983 of well witnessed, epidemic violence in the community setting, to mass forced translocations to large detention centres in 1984, to a more clandestine policy of forced disappearances in 1985, ahead of the elections. Thousands were murdered in 1983 and 1984: In 1985, hundreds of key community leaders were called to their doors in the middle of the night, taken away in vehicles without number plates and have never been seen again.
Now I've seen defenders of Kim Il Sung thought shrug and say the North Korean government isn't responsible for the actions of the Zimbabwe military, but it is responsible for its own actions. After this very bloody example of the what the Zimbabwe army was using its equipment and training for the North Korean government did nothing, it still maintained its relationship.
Of course despite the growing rift between North Korea and the rest of the "socialist" camp, and the increasing consolidation of power within himself and his son, the system largely worked, he was able to build an independent and increasingly industrialised nation, a dictatorship with a powerful personality cult that would rival and outlast Stalin and Mao's, but the lights turned on, the harvests were collected, and the military could develop cutting edge weapons. At least until the 1990s anyway, then the combination of an aging and in poor health Kim Il Sung, being increasingly isolated from the handful of powerful state administrators, the collapse of many of North Korea's largest trading partners and poor harvest and torrential rain led to a massive economic and social breakdown that had to be attended to by his son.
Kim Jong Il
"He doesn't feel responsible for the famine. he believes that the responsibility falls on the economists. The only thing he's concerned about is Kim il Sung's Ten Principle's and compliance thereof"
Hwang Jang-yop
[220]
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https://www.slideserve.com/mabli/famines
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The coup plot was led by political committees and included commanders of battalions, while the chief secretary of North Hamkyung Province, administrative cadres, vice directors of the provincial National Security Agency and Social Safety Agency and other cadres were implicated. The group was apparently planning to start an uprising in North Hamkyung Province first and then head for Pyongyang. However, the plan was picked up by Defense Security Command and the ringleaders rounded up. Around 40 were executed and a further 300 severely punished.[221]
Part of the problem was that the government was so vulnerable to criticism, even the implication that it failed that much like the Soviet Union in the 1920s-30s it actively tried to suppress the news of a famine both outside and inside its borders.
One of my respondents, Mr. Jae-young Yoon, a middleaged former soldier from Chongjin whose son died from starvation, explained that the subject of hunger had to be avoided altogether in social discourse: “If someone had died of hunger you couldn’t say that they were so hungry they died. You could say they were in so much pain they died. When you were working you would always feel hungry, to work without having eaten, argh!! There was no way you could say ‘I am so hungry, I can’t do it.’ ‘I’m in pain,’ you could say” (Field Research January 2006, Seoul). Other survivors shared equally devastating experiences. Mr. Chung-su Om and Mrs. Sun-ja Om, who were among Pyongyang’s social elite, had prepared a small banquet when I arrived at their house. It was common for North Korean’s to show this kind of warmth and generosity to me during the course of my research, but it was always awkward. While eating bowls of rice and plates of kimchi and seaweed, they described the sound of the famine, “Like frogs or mosquitoes in the night, the children cried of hunger” (Field Research, February 2006, Seoul). The sound of the famine could be heard in the night, when the labor of the day was done and nothing remained but hunger: “The children didn’t know better,” Mrs. Sun-Ja Om explained, “[unlike us] they did complain about the hunger. They were always crying for food” (Field Research, February 2006, Seoul). Back in North Korea, these painful observations were not to be discussed. People were either aware of the repercussions of voicing them or they were made aware by the authorities. Mr. Chul-Su Kim, also among the Pyongyang elite, explained that, while drunk, he lamented his father’s death from hunger. The next day he got a knock on the door from the secret police. Two officers ordered him out of the house and interrogated him.[222]
It wasn't until 1995 when the flooding and then droughts gave the government a pretext for blame that belated relief attempts were made with North Korea finally making a formal request for international assistance. Despite this, the death toll is estimated at over 500,000 with some going into the millions.
The famine and its aftermath would be used by Kim Jong Il to dispose of the rest of his fathers close circle of advisers, including the surviving veterans of the Korean partisan fight against Japanese occupation.
Then came the Yong Sung Spies incident, an event that would
clear out all the holdovers from the Kim il-sung era. The great purge began with Sun Gwan-hee, then minister of agriculture, who was otherwise a loyal subject of the state and Kim Jong-Il. He
was made a scapegoat for the failed crops and was dragged to a
busy intersection in Pyongyang and executed in front of a large crowd. "South Korean spy" was the justification for his execution,
and many original partisans would suffer the same fate.
They even dug up the remains of the former chairman of the agricultural commission of the Party, Kim Man-geum (dead since 1984), and
shot him to pieces. Kim Jong-il praised the members of the Yong
Sung group as heroes for rooting out the enemy spies.
[223]
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| Sun Gwan-hee, also translated as So Kwan-hui |
A major pusher for the purge was Kim's brother in law Jang Song Thaek who will appear again in Kim Jong-Un's entry.
Beyond the famine there isn't much to commend Kim Jong Il, the devastation it caused eventually forced the North Korea government to attempt to rebuild bridges with South Korea and Japan, and there was increased participation in the global capitalist economy. Though even when trying to play nice Kim Jong-il couldn't stop himself from exposing some of the horrible policies of his and his father's system.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has admitted that his country kidnapped Japanese citizens - and that at least four were still alive.Eight Japanese nationals, who were abducted in the 1970s and 80s, are confirmed dead.
[224]Yes North Korea has engaged in international kidnappings, especially in South Korea and Japan. Kim Jong-il himself took part in this program while his father was busy running the country. The most famous case of this was the abduction of South Korean Director Shin Sang-Ok and his ex-wife actress Choi Eun-hee. He made them work on a North Korean Kaiju film and also tried to get them to reconcile.
This incident because of how surprising and strange is easy to underestimate, but if he behaved that way towards citizens of a foreign nation, when he wasn't fully in control of the power system of North Korea, it doesn't bode well for how treated his own subjects, especially once all centres of potential opposition within the state, party and military were dealt with.
He left an impoverished but still standing North Korea to be inherited by his son (officially North Korea is still a republic, though this is straining credibility, and it doesn't help that each successive Kim gets an honorary demotion in leadership maintaining an explicit familial link)
Kim Jong Un
Well Kim Jong Un came to power stressing continuity from his father and grand father, but it took awhile for this to made clear what that meant. Despite posturing this seems so far to have meant further market reforms, more inequality, and a further distancing from its Cold War past. Kim Il Sung started this off by replacing the cult of Stalin with himself. But references to Marxism and socialism remained important in the state ideology.
Kim Il-Jong furthered this by elevating the cult of Kim Il Sung to even greater heights, and coupled it with even more military worship and nationalism, displacing much of the old branding around internationalism and socialism.
Now it looks like Kim Jong-un is completing the rebranding process
Though the inter party purge remains a hard habit to break at least. Since coming to power there have been many rumours and speculations about the fate of multiple senior leaders in the party, government and military, the most notable of which was the downfall of Jang Song-Thaek the former hero of Kim Jong-il in the 1990s. Over about a year Jang Song-Thaek was isolated and demoted before he and several close aides were arrested and executed for numerous alleged offenses.The word “communism” was removed from the North Korean constitution in 2009 revisions and from to the Workers’ Party regulations in 2010 revisions. When family reunions were held in 2009 during the fall holiday of Chuseok, South Korean reporters were given access to the North’s Kumgang Mountain resort. Once there, reporters inquired about the deletion of the word “communism” from the North Korean constitution.“Chairman Kim Jong Il said, ‘Communism is not being grasped. I’ll need to properly try socialism,’” the North Korean representative in dialogue with the reporter responded. The journalist then asked what was meant by “communism is not being grasped.”The North Korean explained the statement by saying, “Communism describes a society wherein there is no demarcation between the exploited class and the exploiting class. As long as America is still around, it will be very difficult for that to come to fruition.” In other words, the prospect of achieving a classless society – the ideal communist society – was viewed as unrealistic. The solution was to turn to socialism instead.However, between then and now, North Korea has also deleted “socialism” from its lexicon. What’s more, the phrase chosen to replace the deleted word is “Kimilsungungism- Kimjongilism.” Kim Jong Il removed ‘communism’ and Kim Jong Un removed ‘socialism.’ In their place, the regime has highlighted the cult of leadership through the formalization of “Kimilsungist-Kimjongilist ideology.”[225]
2013 -- North Korea's Korean Central News Agency announces that Jang Song-thaek, the disgraced uncle of the North's state leader Kim Jong-un, has been executed after a military trial found him guilty of "anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional" charges.[226]
So far at the time of writing he remains in control. And has pushed in an ever more exploitative direction. Joint investment and tourist zones with South Korea and the People's Republic of China have increased in number and size and scope, though the prosperity hasn't trickled down.
Of course to be fair to the "marshal" the introduction of international capitalism didn't start with him, the process was already underway under his father's leadership. The Korean Friendship Association has for many years had a section of its website devoted to encouraging investment in North Korea and has a lot of attractive sales pitches.“Employees at a joint Sino-North Korean enterprise [name redacted for the safety of the source] located in Rason usually receive 300 yuan (around 50,000 South Korean won) per month, but this month they were only paid 100 yuan,” said a source in North Hamgyong Province on August 6. “Without any prior notice, 200 yuan was taken out of their salaries to be used as funding for regime projects.”The North Korean authorities have placed great importance on the development of the Wonsan area along with events surrounding the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the nation on September 9. State officials are forcibly taking money from the pockets of ordinary citizens to pay for these projects, according to the source.“In the past, the state took some money from people’s salaries but never a full two-thirds,” he said. “It’s difficult enough surviving on 200 yuan, so people are very worried about how to survive off a measly 100 yuan.”One family working at the enterprise typically earns 400 yuan a month but received just 200 yuan this month, he said, explaining that “it’s not enough to even get them through the month […] They have no money saved up and are worried that more money will be taken out of their salaries next month as well.”Overseas workers are also being forced to contribute part of their salaries to what is referred to as a “loyalty fund.”[227]
IKBC The International Korean Business Centre is a comprehensive one-stop service for worldwide companies and individuals interested to trade and explore opportunities with the DPR of Korea. IKBC has its main headquarters in Pyongyang, and external offices in Thailand and Spain. IKBC is an official DPRK organization, not an agent. The business center is composed by DPRK Government Officials, with more than 15 years experience and experts in the fields of foreign relations, international trade and banking. We have a comprehensive assistance and financial network inside and outside the DPR of Korea backed by the highest Ministries and Embassies of the Republic. Our focus are imports, exports and Joint Ventures in any economical field. We will study the feasibility of your proposal and guide you in the feasibility, preparation, maintenance and success of your project....
Business in DPR Korea:
[228]
There's even a book by one of the foreign capitalist businessmen who came to Pyongyang and helped lay the ground work for establishing a more global business friendly economic framework called A Capitalist in North Korea by Felix Abt. Its worth reading if you're interested in the economy of North Korea, it keeps calling North Korea a communist country which annoys me but its very in depth. Felix Abt would leave the country in 2009 but remained an important point of contact of business interests operating in North Korea. And it does still have some information on how this economic development has continued under the "marshal".
Having recognized this, Kim Jong Un worked out a new agricultural policy in 2012 addressing some of these problems. Indeed, farmers were told in July 2012 that the state would henceforth take only 70 percent instead of 100 percent from their entire harvest.....
Kim Jong Un acknowledged in a landmark speech that he would make sure that North Koreans “will never have to tighten their belts again.” Indeed, ever since his succession, a number of economically oriented policy advisors have risen to power. This will lead to more streamlining of the bureaucracy and the creation of a more investor-friendly environment. I have met some of these new bureaucrats, whom I consider to be clearly pro-business and pro-growth. A few small changes have already been made in market policy: more flexible opening hours are allowed for markets, and more companies are permitted to interact with businesses abroad. These have led to changes in light industry and economic development in the broader sense.[229]
Even the demise of Jang Song-thaek and his economist friends hasn't diminished Felix Abt's optimism at the pace of economic reform carried out under Kim Jong-Un.
There is no doubt that the government continues to attempt economic reform, even if through a system of trial and error. In Korea Focus, a well-informed author writes: “The objective of the New Economic Management System introduced by Kim Jong Un in North Korea is the building of an ‘unplanned socialist economy,’ or something similar to the ‘socialist commodity economy’ China implemented between 1984 and 1992.”[230]
So, we're left with a brutal and weakened and impoverished police state that treats its past with increasing embarrassment, and if it has any socialist connections left is in the emulation of Deng Xiaoping.
Julius Nyerere
". . . the community of the traditional African village was a truly socialist community. Everyone worked. Everyone shared. There were no classes, no privi- leges either for food or self-respect. Wealth belonged to all and all shared in its assets. Only exploiters were missing. There were no landlords and no idlers to live off the labor of others.,
Julius Nyerere
For the 420 million people of Africa, independence has brought little, if any more, freedom than under colonialism. Tanzania has more political prisoners than South Africa. One fourth of the population of equatorial Guinea is in exile
Sam Dolgoff 1977
[232]
Julius Nyerere became the leader of an independent Tanzania once its borders were consolidated. He was a public advocate of a form of African Socialism which was officially called by the Swahili word Ujamaa and was said to be based on pre colonial African social organisations and customs. So its curious that he tried to build this socialist society through a nation state and civil administration that inherited from the British colonial authorities. The independence of Tanzania was not particularly revolutionary, it was managed with open co-operation with the British government, independent Tanganyika had a Govenor General in the early days, and Nyerere himself would appeal to British assistance in restoring order such as in 1964 when his Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) government was threatened by both mutinies and a general strike.
In the meantime, a group of politicians and trade union leaders including an Area Commissioner who had been a long-time TANU stalwart, had begun conspiring with the ringleaders of the mutiny to bring about a real overthrow of the government. They planned to initiate a general strike on Saturday, followed by a coup on the following Monday in which, it was rumoured, Nyerere and his ministers would be removed.
Nyerere got word of this on Friday afternoon and Friday evening he asked for British aid. Fortunately for the government, the British were close at hand and the more serious threat was stopped before it could materialize. On Saturday night police detained about 200 persons, including officials of five major unions and the General Secretary of the Tanganyika Federation of Labour. Most of the officials are only now being released. The government has announced plans to disband the TFL and its eleven affiliated unions and to institute in their place a single, giant trade union representing all the workers in the country. Though the trade unions have opposed the government in the past, they have paraded through Dar es Salaam almost daily for a week to demonstrate their present loyalty.
[233]
Nyerere would eventually stabilise the situation by turning TANU into the blueprint for a one party state and concentrating power into the hands of state ministries. The country was essentially built on a contradiction, the countryside saw the development of many Ujamaa villages, new villages that were designed to be communal and promote self reliance based on a sucessful pioneering of co-operative villages in Litowa in 1960. But this villages still had to operated within a planned national economy structure along five year plans. If peasants did not want to move to these new collective villages then they were forcibly moved to them, much like in the Soviet Union of 1920s this disruption led to severe shortages in agricultural output in some regions.
Unfortunately, the implementation of the Ujamaa scheme was heavy-handed. Although Nyerere originally stated that the re-villagisation process would be voluntary, reports returned of villages being burned and their inhabitants fleeing under force. Nyerere responded that he had no knowledge of the violent methods used to carry out his policies in distant regions of his land, especially the far south and north. The results were drastic, as entire villages and rural regions suffered extreme poverty and near starvation when they were forced to leave the land that had provided their subsistent existence and to immediately establish new crops on unknown land. The policy for agricultural collectives suffered because the 8,200 Ujamaa villages were mainly reliant on the hand-hoe, meaning that group action had little effect and many farmers were reduced to subsistence farming. The sisal plantations, previously a highly developed industry, suffered hopeless detriment as a result of mismanagement and cashew farmers moved so far from their crops that they abandoned them. Government officials placed within the villages held the balance of power, over that of elected representatives.
[234]
Though the promises of health and educational services at the new villages were mostly kept, so progress was made on reducing infant mortality and improving education. However the new system failed to build a prosperous Tanzania, and when Idi Amin invaded the country in 1979 the Tanzanian military had to be mobilised, and while it successfully drove back the Ugandan army, deposed Idi Amin and put Obote in power, it left the nation effectively bankrupt.
Throughout the 1980s Tanzania found itself increasingly debt ridden and dependent on foreign aid from the west. A demoralised Nyerere denationalised large portions of the economy, and stepped down in 1985 leaving his successors to negotiate IMF loans.
Zanzibar
The reason Tanzania got its name is because after independence it absorbed the neighbouring territory of Zanzibar, which was also a colonial possession of the British Empire. To this day the union has proven extremely controversial with Zanzibaris accusing the government on the mainland of treating the islands just like the old colonial powers, essentially an alliance with a local brutal elite and overwhelming force.
For example in 1984 just before Nyerere stepped down he faced a potential crisis that could see Zanzibar become independent, and responded with troop deployments to maintain control.
Nyerere sent 2,000 troops to the islands in 1984, forced Jumbe to resign and put Ali Hassan Mwinyi in power as president, with Seif Shariff Hamad who now leads the CUF, as chief minister. He regarded them both as reliable men who would defend the union between Zanzibar and the mainland. They introduced free market reforms similar to those that were then being put into action on the mainland under an IMF plan.
[235]
Ultimately if we take Nyerere at his word he seems to be a pretty clear failure. He's an advocate of African independence who turned for help from the old coloniser in fighting his own people, he actively oppressed and colonised an independent territory, promoted self reliance up to the point his citizens used that self reliance to deviate from a one party system, promoted economic independence, only to negotiate aid packages and loans from many countries from the UK to China and the IMF and World Bank.
Oddly though none of this seems to have damaged his reputation very much, I even found an article in the liberal Guardian newspaper praising the achievements of the wonderful villages he built, even though it acknowledges that the project and its most successful examples were founded independently of him. I think its worth quoting at length,
Some people decided to put ujamaa into practice in 1960, even before Nyerere had invented the name for his bold and imaginative strategy. They succeeded brilliantly in Litowa, the first ujamaa village they created – organising production, distribution, housing, health and education. Others came to join and were encouraged to form new villages; limiting village size enabled all to have a voice. When there were a few villages, the Ruvuma Development Association (RDA) was formed with its Social and Economic Revolutionary Army to help new villages to establish themselves. By 1969, the RDA had 17 villages.
A couple of times a week the village had communal meals where they made decisions. The women were encouraged to speak – a slow process – and their interests were considered. Housework and childcare counted as part of the village workday. Soon piped water ended fetching and carrying by women and children. Spare cash from sales of surplus crops was divided equally among all, including to elderly and disabled people who contributed by scaring wild animals from “sharing” food crops, or working in the new childcare facility.
Child mortality plummeted. Pupils at the self-governing Litowa school came from all the villages, boarding at Litowa in term time. They were not trained to compete or join the educated elite but to develop their exciting, caring rural society. Domestic violence virtually disappeared. Women’s status was rising, and the disapproval of others was discipline enough.
Nyerere backed them. When people asked what he meant by ujamaa, he would send them to Ruvuma. Just as ujamaa was about to mushroom into a mass movement, the RDA was destroyed by the greedy and ambitious new ruling elite, capitalism by the back door. They, hated the creativity of the people which had Nyerere’s support. Where was the power for them? Thus a great grassroots development, which might have changed the history of Tanzania and beyond,tragically ended. Nyerere, defeated, continued to work for socialist equity, in general and between the sexes.
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This is quite explicitly pro Nyerere, but if we look a bit deeper and apply some critical thinking it largely rings hollow. If Nyerere was in charge and actively backing the projects (how did he back them?) with the support of the population then how did the capitalists destroy them? Which capitalists are these anyway, the corrupt state administrators and party leadership, or Tanzania's international financiers? It seemed to be a combination of both from what I've read, and far from working for socialist equity Nyerere continued his position as an elder statesmen in a system that kept making accommodations with financial capital and moved away from the one party system to a more typical multi party system.
Even at its most enthusiastic it seems Nyerere recognised a good idea, then decided to control it through the power of decree and security forces.
Sukarno
Seeing Sukarno on the list was yet another cause for disbelief had I not spoken to the creators of the list and continued to use social media spaces where these types congregate when the military Junta of Myanmar and the King of Thailand faced domestic opposition. Sukarno was another independence leader who became a dictator of Indonesia after the Dutch empire collapsed in the aftermath of World War II. What's interesting about Sukarno is that during the early days of the Cold War he tried to balance both sides and maintained official relations with the US and USSR, and for several years the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) would be a partner in his ruling coalition which included Islamists, nationalists and most importantly the army.
In 1948 the PKI had launched an uprising against the Indonesian government which was defeated. Sukarno was at the time President, though his power was extremely weak during this period, though over the years he would take on more power under the guise of "guided democracy" and built bridges with the PKI. However the key pillar to the Sukarno system was the military whose budget ballooned, with the struggling economy turning to printing money to cope with the expenses, this lead to economic stagnation in the 1960s. Also during the 1960s a controversial event took place in 1965 the 30th September Movement kidnapped and murdered several generals and attempted a coup that fizzled out. The Indonesian right and the CIA accused the PKI of being behind the attempt, though this is disputed as most of the evidence for PKI involvement was extracted through torture. However the accusations stuck many did believe it and right wing mobs with the support of the military now firmly in the control of Suharto who would succeed Sukarno as President of Indonesia in 1967 launch a series of incredibly brutal massacres and purges of the PKI and suspected sympathisers. Estimates on casualties range from 500,000 to over a million, and the PKI was effectively demolished as a political force.
Sukarno much like in 1948 gave his consent to this crackdown, specifically signing an order that made Suharto and the army's actions legal. Some have defenced Sukarno on the grounds that it seems probable that he was coerced into consenting and that maybe true. But that means that he collaborated with a massive massacre to save himself and stayed on as President only leaving power once Suharto felt secure enough to replace him.
The history of the Sukarno and the PKI is one of economic stagnation and both Sukarno and the PKI collaborating in building the very system that destroyed them both.
