April 23, 2003
The Korean Friendship Association's bark
is far worse than its bite, reports Eric Ellis.
Some people spot trains, some people spot planes, but being a member of the
Korean Friendship Association requires more than a wardrobe of matching beige
anoraks.
For many KFA devotees, the ensemble is best set off by a little badge of the fabled Great Leader Kim Il-sung on the left lapel, the one all North Koreans are required to wear above their heart in deference to the personality cult surrounding the late Kim and his son, Kim Jong-il, the Dear Leader of the world's last Stalinist regime.
With a funky web site and a noble purpose to "build international ties of friendship", the KFA is Pyongyang's quasi-official cheer squad outside the so-called Hermit Kingdom.
Robert Nixon has been organising the KFA in Australia from his Townsville home since January. Not that the KFA requires much organisation; it has just 15 Australian members, of some 500 worldwide, a good few of them union officials and Communist Party of Australia rank-and-file.
But Nixon, 29, is neither, and nor has he been given one of those Kim badges yet. (A foreigner with a Kim badge is a rare thing. I once tried to buy one from a North Korean I cornered in a Pyongyang alley and not even my – admittedly phony – offer of $US10,000 could prise it free.) Describing himself as a classical pianist, Nixon also directs the Australian Society of Musicology and Composition – patron one Peter Hollingworth, Governor-General. Nixon got interested in the KFA soon after US President George W Bush gathered North Korea into his axis of evil. "I saw lots of negative media about and thought it was most unfair so I got in touch with the KFA to see what I could do in Australia," he says.
"No less an Australian" for his devotion, Nixon hasn't yet been to North Korea, "but I'd love to go." He might be disappointed. Far from being a socialist paradise, the United Nations says the impoverished country is gripped by a decade-long famine. Washington and Canberra say it's a rogue state threatening the world with nuclear weapons.
But if Washington is to take its war on terror to the Korean peninsula, the KFA will need to show more backbone than Nixon has. A day after The Bulletin contacted him, he announced his sudden resignation, apparently for fear of negative publicity, or perhaps that the G-G and fellow "musicologists" might get the wrong idea about him. "My role as official delegate may perhaps have led to a misinterpretation of my viewpoint or position, which, of course, I would wish to avoid," he says.
A badge isn't in the mail.