President Kim Il Sung and his contribution

BY ALHASSAN MAMMAN MUHAMMAD

Kim Il Sung (1912-1994), eternal president of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), devoted his whole life to accomplishing the anti-imperialist cause for the independence of mankind.

By brilliantly applying the philosophical principle of the Juche idea, which he had authored, to the national liberation struggle, he put forward the guidelines for the national liberation movement that the oppressed peoples of the world could achieve their genuine freedom and independence by their own efforts and struggle.

In June 1930, he set forth the line of an organized armed struggle by one’s own revolutionary armed forces and the relevant strategic and tactical issues.

He created a brilliant example in the history of national liberation struggles by giving a scientific and theoretical explanation to the problems of the revolutions for national liberation in the colonies for the first time in history and by leading the anti-Japanese armed struggle to victory.

The cultural conference held in Havana, Cuba, in 1968 adopted a document, titled, Anti-Japanese Armed Struggle of the Korean People Launched and Waged under the Direct Leadership of President Kim Il Sung, and decided to take it as the strategy and tactic of the anti-imperialist struggle for national liberation of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The document reads in part, “The victory of the anti-Japanese armed struggle was achieved thanks to President Kim Il Sung, an ever-victorious brilliant commander, who put forward political programme and scientific methods to realize them and to his outstanding strategic and tactical leadership.”

President Kim Il Sung actively supported the national liberation struggles of the oppressed peoples of the world and encouraged them to achieve victory.

He provided the peoples of various countries including Mozambique, Angola, and Zimbabwe with valuable experiences and important instructions and assisted them with everything they requested when they were waging armed struggles for independence against imperialism and colonialism.

Robert G. Mugabe, who visited the DPRK in April 1980, immediately after the people of Zimbabwe, who had groaned under the oppression and exploitation of the colonialists for over one century, at last, achieved independence through a protracted armed struggle, said to President Kim Il Sung: As our request and righteous cause coincided with the righteous cause of the Korean people and the Workers’ Party of Korea, we asked you a considerable amount of assistance, and you ratified it and offered assistance to us as you promised; indeed you have become our closest friend and inseparable ally.

President Kim Il Sung gave encouragement and confidence to the progressive peoples struggling for independence and made an outstanding contribution to the cause of independence of mankind.

In his speech, titled, For a Free and Peaceful New World, delivered at the opening ceremony of the 85th Conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union held in Pyongyang in April 1991.

Kim Il Sung emphasized that all the countries and nations, as equal members of the international society, should maintain independence, oppose power politics, and vigorously wage a worldwide joint struggle to prevent aggression and war.

When he met Francois Mitterrand, the leader of the Socialist Party of France, on the latter’s visit to the DPRK in February 1981 Kim Il Sung said to him that the European countries, in order to prevent a new world war, should not join any bloc, but make their countries independent and neutral and help the developing countries so that they could firmly maintain independence, realize peace and build independent sovereign states.

Mitterrand told Kim Il Sung that he had never heard from anybody such valuable remarks that clearly analyzed and estimated many problems.

Mitterrand was elected as president of France in May that year; at the G7 summit, he said that Kim Il Sung was an outstanding leader of the present era.

Though 26 years have already elapsed since President Kim Il Sung passed away, his contribution to the anti-imperialist cause for the independence of mankind is being told with undiminished admiration.

Alhassan Mamman Muhammad is a professor at the University of Abuja