Tourism minister urges no protests against North Korean soccer team

By Alex Bell
19 April 2010

Tourism minister Walter Mzembi has urged civil society organisations to drop plans for protests against the arrival of the North Korean football team next month, saying ‘politics’ should not be mixed with sport.

Government officials revealed earlier this month that North Korea had agreed to set up camp in Zimbabwe in late May, ahead of the June football World Cup in South Africa. The Koreans are also scheduled to play a series of friendly matches against Zimbabwe teams in both Harare and Bulawayo. But the scheduled presence of a team under the dictatorship of President Kim Jong Il has seen an angry response from civil society, because of North Korea’s role in training the notorious Fifth Brigade responsible for the Gukurahundi massacres.

Activists and civil society groups have warned this month that places like Bulwayo’s Barbourfields Stadium will be a “centre of resistance” should the North Korean team venture into the region, where some 20,000 civilians were killed by the Fifth Brigade in the 1980s. The Robert Mugabe loyal army unit was trained by North Korean experts, before being deployed in the Matabeleland and Midlands regions by Mugabe, who accused the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) of planning an insurgency against his administration.

Civil society groups have condemned the move to host the North Korean team as “an insult” to both the dead and the survivors of the ethnic-cleaning Gukurahundi ‘exercise’, which saw the exclusively Shona Fifth Brigade massacre mainly Ndebele civilians. The opposition group ZAPU, whose supporters from the Ndebele minority in the region were the main victims of the Fifth Brigade, has said it is “anxious” to know the real motive behind the invitation of the North Korean national soccer team. Methuseli Moyo, ZAPU’s spokesman, said: “Should the authorities decide to go ahead with their plan (to allow North Korea to visit), no one should blame the people if they decide to demonstrate their feelings in any way they may choose to.”

Effie Ncube, an activist with the Matabeleland Constitutional Reform Agenda in Bulawayo, said last week that more than 30 church and civil society organisations concerned with human rights issues have begun mobilising against the invitation by Zimbabwe’s tourism minister. Ncube is quoted by South Africa’s Mail and Guardian newspaper as saying that protests have been planned during the North Korean team’s stay in Zimbabwe and as well as at all their matches during the tournament in South Africa. Ncube said the protests would go ahead if the lobbying of political parties and the government fails.

”We’ve had no response from government yet. But we don’t expect them to respond, especially on the issue of Gukurahundi, which nobody is allowed to really speak about,” said Ncube, loosely referring to the recent forced closure of an art exhibition in Bulawayo about the Gukurahundi killings.

Tourism minister Mzembi meanwhile was quoted this weekend as appealing to the rights groups not to mix politics with sport and to allow national healing to take place.
“Sport must remain the bridge for people-to-people contact, probably the only bridge that has remained standing even when nation states are in a state of fall-out,” he said.
“I wouldn’t want to make this a political issue. It’s purely a sports issue.” He said he had extended invitations to the major teams in the World Cup, including Brazil, England and the United States, but North Korea was the only team that had responded.