WHEN Ceylon's leftist government was recently confronted with a massive insurrection by a group of Maoist dissidents known as the People's Liberation Front, it clamped down immediately on one important source of the trouble: it accused the North Korean embassy in Colombo of complicity in the uprising, ordered the embassy closed, and expelled 18 North Korean diplomats. By last week, after a month of fighting throughout the island, several hundred Ceylonese were dead, but the government was slowly gaining an upper hand against the insurgents.
The involvement of the North Koreans in the Ceylon insurrection dramatized the extent to which guerrilla training has become an international activity. Today, with the help of a foreign "scholarship" and perhaps a forged passport, a young, aspiring revolutionary from any of several dozen countries may travel halfway round the world to learn the use of rifles and machine guns, the making of Molotov cocktails and the art of political kidnaping. Then, after several months or even years of training, he returns to his home country to put his education into practice.
Almost every region of the world can qualify today as either a target of terrorists or a training ground. Even the tranquil fields of The Netherlands have served as a mock battlefield for a group of Indonesian separatists seeking independence for the South Moluccas Islands; Basque nationalists train secretly in northern Spain and southwestern France. Many countries dabble in terrorism, but five in particular have become large-scale exporters of insurgency. The five:
NORTH KOREA was recently accused of training Mexican as well as Ceylonese terrorists (TIME, April 19). According to the Mexican government, 50 young Mexicans using North Korean passports traveled to Pyongyang by way of the Soviet Union—a clear indication to the Mexican government that the Russians were in on the deal. The North Koreans, moreover, gave members of the Mexican group $26,000 for travel expenses and the recruiting of additional guerrillas in Mexico.
To some extent, the North Koreans have concentrated on waging terrorist attacks against South Korea, but they have also managed to train 2,000 guerrillas from 25 countries; 700 foreign rebels are now believed to be in residence in ten special camps. Training lasts from six to 18 months. Foreigners as well as Koreans are taught taekwondo, the local version of judo and karate, and are put through such rigorous training as running five hours at night, sometimes through rough mountain terrain, shouldering 100-lb. sandbags. "Running, running, running," in fact, is the training slogan.
CUBA has trained some 2,500 Latin American guerrillas during the past decade. In addition, the Cubans have sent military instructors to Algeria and to the Congo-Brazzaville. Despite Fidel Castro's tough words two weeks ago about aligning himself with the "revolutionary peoples of the world," Cuba's training program has been somewhat curtailed in the post-Che Guevara period. While still capable of exploiting regional trouble spots, the Cubans have lately been preoccupied with economic problems at home and have been inhibited by the fact that leftist movements in many Latin American countries are splintered.