The last personality cults - Toughs at the top

The last personality cults

Toughs at the top

 

Dec 16th 2004 | LOMÉ
From The Economist print edition

 

AFP

Self-obsessed despots are out of fashion in most places, but not in North Korea, Turkmenistan and Togo

WHEN a train carrying explosives blew up in North Korea last April, setting fire to nearby buildings, several people died trying to save portraits of their “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong Il, from the flames. Some rescued pictures of the pudgy dictator before searching for trapped relations.

 

This story is typical of what North Koreans have to read over breakfast, if they have any breakfast. True or not, it tells you something about North Korea. Official propagandists actually believe that it reflects well on their regime. To those in their thrall, personality cults can make perfect sense. To anyone else, they would be funny were they not so foul.

 

Half a century ago, in his novel “1984”, George Orwell fretted that totalitarianism would conquer the world. But totalitarianism did not work, so it has all but disappeared. Communism was “brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes,” as P.J. O'Rourke, an American humorist, has put it. Stalin still has a few imitators, but the most convincing of them was found cowering in a hole near Tikrit last year.

 

To study personality cults today is to study an endangered species. To find living examples, you have to go to forgotten, remote and usually beleaguered places like North Korea, Turkmenistan and Togo. This article looks at the cults in these places and ask three questions. Why do they survive, how long will they last, and why do those who build them always have such vile personalities?

 

Kim Jong Il's regime is arguably the world's nastiest. It is not easy to make a country populated by Koreans poor, but some 5-10% of the people in the people's paradise starved to death in the 1990s. Those overheard complaining could, indeed still can, be sent to freezing prison camps.

 

“No foreigner likes North Korea,” writes Michael Breen, the author of a recent biography of Mr Kim. The country is drab and joyless. The capital, Pyongyang, has wide boulevards but little traffic. It has big monuments to the Dear Leader and his father, Kim Il Sung, the “Great Leader”—but nothing to do, except work, and little to buy.

Adulation, for the man who has everything

 

Chaperones escort foreign visitors everywhere, lying constantly. “This shop is empty because it's a holiday.” “The lights have gone off because it makes a more romantic atmosphere for dinner.” “The Americans started the Korean war.” And so on. A Chinese diplomat in Pyongyang once begged your correspondent to linger for tea, explaining that, bored witless, he had to talk to someone who would not keep praising the Kims for the sunshine.

 

Everyone is spied on. The linguists who watch foreigners are keen to let their subjects know they are being watched, because they could land in trouble if the foreigners misbehaved. Mr Breen tells of two Danish engineers who griped to each other about the dullness of the place, in their hotel room, in Danish. one said he wished he had brought a pack of cards. The next day, his guide gave him one.

 

Turkmenistan, a country of 5m people in Central Asia, is not as shackled as North Korea, but the locks are clicking. It used to be a Soviet vassal state, ruled by a Moscow stooge called Saparmurat Niyazov. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Mr Niyazov deftly reinvented himself as a Turkmen patriot, the “Turkmenbashi” or father of all Turkmen. He banned all opposition, declared himself president-for-life and erected golden statues of himself everywhere, including one in Ashgabat, the capital, which revolves with the sun.

 

A collection of his thoughts on philosophy, ethics and Turkmen culture, the “Rukhnama” (“Book of the Soul”), forms the basis of the school curriculum. Even to pass a driving test, his subjects must show their knowledge of this “sacred” text. The children who have passed through the country's schools most recently are now nearly as brainwashed as North Koreans.

No hurry to go in Togo

 

Togo's ruler, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, is the least revolting of the three, but has been around the longest. A former wrestling champion, Mr Eyadéma seized power in a coup in 1967, when he was 29. He has held on to it through a mixture of guile, force and French support. Of the world's incumbent despots, only Fidel Castro can claim seniority.

 

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Eyadéma's watching

 

Perhaps because Togo is so poor, Mr Eyadéma's personality cult has never been as elaborate as Mr Kim's or Mr Niyazov's. The monuments in Lomé, Togo's capital, do not compare with the monstrosities in Pyongyang and Ashgabat, though the shops feel obliged to display Mr Eyadéma's portrait, and the official media encourage the view that he is superhuman. Morning, noon and night, the radio used to play a jingle that went:

 

Be reassured, Eyadéma,
You were crowned by God!
Be reassured, Eyadéma,
The people are behind you!

 

French support for Mr Eyadéma ended with the cold war. Since then, he has had to pretend to be more democratic, in the hope of pleasing aid donors. The jingle above jangles no more. Togo still has a state television station that shows endless military parades, but it also has independent newspapers that pillory the commander-in-chief. Mr Eyadéma still rigs elections, but less blatantly than before. Whereas in 1986 he romped home with 99.95% of the vote, he barely scraped 57% last year.

 

The benefits of a personality cult are not obvious to anyone but its object. Every country that has endured one has been made wretched by it. The dogma that comes with leader-worship is ridiculous, too. How can anyone believe that Mr Kim is really, as officials claim, the greatest composer of operas, the greatest engineer and, despite having played the game only once, the greatest golfer of all time? Still, the leaders often come to believe their own propaganda, and start to act as though they were indeed gods. Mr Niyazov has renamed months of the calendar after members of his family, banned beards and gold teeth, and built a leisure centre for horses, complete with swimming pool, air-conditioning and an operating theatre.

 

Presidents-for-life are passé in most places, but not in North Korea, where the Dear Leader's father, the country's founding tyrant, was declared “eternal president” after his death in 1994. Mr Niyazov has not gone quite so far; he has merely extended his current eight-year term indefinitely. Mr Eyadéma, though, has resisted the temptation to follow suit, perhaps in a nod to local fashion: Togo's West African neighbours used to be dictatorships, but all went democratic about a decade ago.

 

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...and has protection

 

That fashion may take a while to reach North Korea. The population there falls into three classes: loyal, wavering and hostile. The first group may hold responsible jobs and live in Pyongyang. The second group live in penury. The third live in prison camps, often with their families.

 

Lee Soon Ok is in the third category. A party member in charge of a textile warehouse, she was jailed after she had refused to give a secret policeman some cloth to make a Kim Jong Il-style jacket. Having been beaten and interrogated for months, she was shoved in a hot kiln and then forced to kneel half-naked in the snow for hours on end. After signing a false confession, she was given a softer billet, where she was merely half-starved and subjected to 19 hours of slave labour a day.

 

In the camps, prisoners have to memorise rules such as “Adore Kim Jong Il with all your heart,” and informers report disloyal sleep-talk, which is punishable by death. Mr Niyazov's regime, not much better, has jailed about 20,000 dissidents, some after trials in which the defendants likened themselves to worms and their lawyers apologised for defending them. Mr Eyadéma runs a more haphazard police state. His heavies occasionally kill dissidents, but most endure only sporadic harassment.

 

Fear is a necessary tool for sustaining a personality cult, but it is not sufficient. Despots must also make at least some of their people love them. They usually succeed. The hysterical mourners at Kim senior's funeral in 1994 were not all faking it. Some people, it seems, really do yearn for a leader so strong, virtuous and brilliant that he will solve all problems—and moreover they believe that such a person may exist. If the president has all the answers, it “remove[s] the complexities and anguishes from daily living,” points out Mr Niyazov.

 

Despots who wish to be worshipped typically present themselves as embodying something that their people already venerate, such as their religion, their nation, or both. Mr Kim draws on three separate belief systems to buttress his rule: communism, Confucianism and ancient Korean shamanism. He is said to have been born on Mount Paekdu, which is linked in Korean myth with the country's founding. In truth, he was born in Russia.

Togo's ruler, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, is the least revolting of the three, but has been around the longest

 

Mr Kim's father was first foisted on North Korea by Stalin, whose propaganda people cooked up a largely bogus account of his heroic role in booting the Japanese colonists out of Korea. From the 1970s, the Great Leader put his son in charge of the ghost-writers who wrote all his infallible books. He did a good job, thus showing himself to be a pious son.

 

A former film director, he is keen on movies. The better to make them, he had a South Korean director kidnapped and brought to Pyongyang with his actress wife. His instructions to North Korea's creative types are a model of clarity. For example: “When singing of the joy of nature, lyrics should reflect the advantages of the socialist system.”

 

In the 1970 edition of North Korea's “Dictionary of Political Terminologies”, hereditary succession was called “a product of slave societies...later adopted by feudal lords to perpetuate dictatorial rule”. Two years later, this entry was gone. Similarly, the Kims would airbrush good foreigners out of their country's history (the bad ones they kept in). In their view, the making of Korea has been an all-Korean affair: they proclaimed a uniquely Korean ideology of juche, or self-reliance, ignoring the country's dependence on Soviet and Chinese aid.

 

Nationalism can elide into that other powerful emotion, hatred, and despots like the Kims make sure to push it that way. A foreign enemy makes it easier to demand unity and obedience. That is why, in maths classes, North Korean children are taught to add and subtract by totting up, and taking away, numbers of dead American soldiers.

 

Mr Niyazov uses similar tricks, though he is less practised. He keeps mosques under state control and puts a copy of the “Rukhnama” next to the Koran in every one. He also poses as a defender of Turkmen culture against Russian infiltration. After independence in 1991, he ditched the Cyrillic alphabet for the Roman one and made Turkmen the language of instruction in schools, despite the lack of textbooks written in it. He has barred the 100,000 Russians who live in Turkmenistan from owning property. Many have fled.

 

Togo, though tiny, is ethnically and religiously diverse, so Mr Eyadéma has to pretend to be blessed both by the Christian God and by various pagan spirits. These spirits apparently protect him from death. Assassins' bullets fired point-blank at him have somehow missed him, according to his publicists, and a bomb once brought down his aircraft, but not its passenger.

 

To a foreign audience, Mr Eyadéma plays down the mysticism. on his website, for example, when asked by a sycophantic interviewer whether some “occult power” shields him, he whispers: “Let me tell you the name of my witch-doctor. It is none other than the Togolese people.”

 

Mr Eyadéma cannot easily appeal to Togolese nationalism, since most of his subjects feel more loyalty to their tribe than to their country. The president is from the north of Togo. Many northerners love him, and he rewards their loyalty with patronage. Those from other parts tend to hate him.

L'état, c'est eux

 

It is a constant struggle, for cult leaders, to keep their followers from hearing views or facts that might puncture their faith. Mr Eyadéma has failed in this, which is why he is looking wobbly. In 1991, under French pressure, he allowed some freedom of ｅxpression. After a quarter-century in which no one dared to complain above a whisper, a cacophony of pent-up fury filled the papers and airwaves.

 

“It was a shock,” says John Zodzi, a local journalist. “Before then, many people thought he was superhuman. Any happiness you felt was attributable to him, but he could easily have you killed. That was how people felt. But then they heard him publicly criticised, and they realised he was just an ordinary man. Now, no one believes in the cult.”

Mr Niyazov's regime has jailed about 20,000 dissidents, some after trials in which the defendants likened themselves to worms and their lawyers apologised for defending them

 

Mr Kim has done a better job of keeping his subjects cut off from reality, but even his grip is faltering. During the 1990s famine, hundreds of thousands of North Koreans risked death to slip into China in search of food. Some brought back tales of how much nicer life was in their more liberal neighbour. Aid-workers report that North Korean refugees in China are now much more critical of the Dear Leader than they were a few years ago.

 

Turkmenistan is not as repressive as North Korea, but Mr Niyazov is doing his best. Spy cameras are being hooked up on street corners to prevent “disorder”. Dissidents can be jailed for life for “sowing doubt” about his policies. Thought has more or less been criminalised. “During the Soviet era, there were active meetings among scientists, artists and other intellectuals. Many thinkers [have now become] traders in markets,” writes Vakil Saparov, a pseudonymous local journalist.

 

How long can these regimes last? “I think Eyadéma is tired and wants to step down,” says a businessman in Lomé. “But he knows that if he does, the opposition will put him on trial.” So he soldiers on. one day, however, he will die or lose control. Then, all bets are off. Togo could follow the example of nearby Côte d'Ivoire, which fell apart after its strongman, Félix Houphouet-Boigny, died. Or it could follow Ghana, which is freer and better off since the dictator Jerry Rawlings relented and called multi-party elections.

 

Mr Niyazov is in a stronger position. Whereas Mr Eyadéma has relaxed a bit in the hope of getting aid, Turkmenistan has lots of natural gas and few cash problems. In October, Mr Niyazov told parliament that he might stand down in 2008 or 2009, but MPs unanimously urged him not to. The Turkmenistan Project, an arm of George Soros's Open Society Institute, doubts his sincerity, “in view of his status as president-for-life and the absence of any alternative candidates or political parties.”

 

North Korea has less money, though Mr Kim ekes out the budget by peddling drugs, arms and fake $100 bills. To be fair, heeding China's example, he has also tried to liberalise the economy a bit since 2002, in the hope of filling some bellies and forestalling demands for political reform. But a quarter of his people stay alive only because they receive food aid from abroad.

 

His other strategy is to seek nuclear weapons, presumably in the hope that foreigners will take him seriously and buy him off. But that will not protect him from his own people, who will surely demand one day to join the other, richer, freer Korea to the south, just as the East Germans wanted to rejoin West Germany. For now, no one wants to be the first to drop the charade of Dear Leader-worship. But as Nicolae Ceausescu discovered in Romania, the first jeer can swiftly become a revolution.

 

And so to the final question. Why are god-kings so odious? All three of our sample can claim, in mitigation, that they had rough childhoods. Mr Kim was born among guerrillas, lost his mother when he was seven and saw his home city bombed flat a year later. Mr Niyazov's father died in the second world war, his mother in an earthquake. Mr Eyadéma was born a peasant and saw hard service with the French army.

 

A psychologist could doubtless make much of these stories. Mr Kim's upbringing was especially odd, in that by the time he started school, his dad had become a dictator and his teachers had been given long instructions on how to please him. But the most obvious reason why despots behave badly is because they can. “Don't praise me too much,” said Mr Niyazov recently. “It is difficult to listen while they sing about you. I sit staring at the ground, blushing.” Sure you do.