Robert Rook, professor of history at Towson University and historian of American military affairs and foreign relations, spoke to a September 16 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
Daniela Bleichmar, professor of art history at the University of Southern California, wrote that “if history is a battleground, then art is a weapon.” Such is the case with the 6th of October War Panorama displayed in a Cairo museum in Egypt commemorating that country’s October 1973 war with Israel. The viewer is seated on a rotating stage that moves around the “dynamic cyclorama wraparound painting” and captures a “particular moment in a battle.”
There is also a diorama comprised of “a physical foreground in terms of war material, dirt, [and] various other natural manifestations.” Although the technology itself is like “a poor man’s IMAX,” this exhibit received state-of-the-art upgrades. The museum is a destination for both tourists and students on field trips.
Although the technology itself is like “a poor man’s IMAX,” this exhibit received state-of-the-art upgrades.
The panorama’s battle scene is of the “ubur,” or “the crossing,” of the Egyptian assault across the Suez Canal during 1973’s Arab-Israeli war. The Egyptian military “breaches Israel’s Bar-Lev line” fortifications, and in the panorama, the Egyptians “reconfigured and repositioned the military events” to portray the war as a major victory. Absent from the visual narrative is Israel’s counter-strike across the canal ten days later that penetrated deep into Egypt. Nonetheless, a case can be made for Egypt’s perception of victory because of the return of the Sinai Peninsula in the peace treaty that followed the war’s end.
A curious aspect of the panorama is that it was built by North Korea’s Mansudae Overseas Projects, “a wholly owned North Korean government operation.” The panorama was gifted to the Egyptian people in 1989, “a pivotal year” mainly because North Korea experienced the “financial fallout” of the breakup of the Soviet Union. This was also due to “a very deep and rather complex, rich relationship between North Korea and Egypt” that predates the panorama.
The Mansudae art company located its Western headquarters in Florence, Italy, “one of the epicenters of the Italian Renaissance,” only five years ago, but Mansudae was “sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control in 2016” and by the U.N. a year later. Mansudae’s exports were included in the list of sanctions imposed on North Korea to punish Pyongyang for its nuclear program, thereby denying any financial benefit that the North Korean regime derived from Mansudae. Despite these sanctions, Mansudae went on to create war-memorializing panoramas, paintings, dioramas, and statues in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Jordan, and throughout Africa, among other locales.
The North Koreans “copy and transplant” artwork from their own panorama portraying North Korea’s Kum River crossing by the Gum San, the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea’s army, during the “epic battle of Taejon” in 1950. The North Korean panorama is adapted with “some of the same kind of re-crafting and restructuring” for other countries’ specific battle memorials.
In Egypt’s October 6th panorama, “the story is Egyptian, but it’s fitted into a template that’s taken right out of the victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang, namely a refashioning of the crossing of the Kum River at the Battle of Taejon.” The Kum River crossing, “with some notable artistic historical adaptations,” is refashioned into the Suez crossing in Egypt’s 6th of October panorama.
In Egypt’s October 6th panorama, “the story is Egyptian, but it’s fitted into a template that’s taken right out of the victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang.”
North Korea was also contracted to redo other military museums in Egypt commemorating various battles. This met North Korea’s dual needs of generating hard currency while also “transferring some of their symbolic iconography” to ideologically compatible leaders looking for national symbols. The ideology of North Korea’s “liberation theology” emerged as “liberation technology,” symbolized by the AK-47 weapon depicted in Mansudae paintings and military statues. In Cairo, a statue of an Egyptian soldier holding an AK-47 aloft stands in front of the Egyptian National War Museum. The “symbolic iconography” is also seen in the massive monument of a “giant bayonet affixed to an AK-47” in Ismailia, located on the eastern shore of the Suez Canal.
“The North Koreans are at work not just in Egypt. They are all over Africa. And by 1998, they built a panorama very much similar to the one that you’ll find in Heliopolis, Cairo, Egypt today in Damascus. The Syrians refer to it simply as the Panorama Adui, the enemy panorama, but it’s North Korean in design and construction and artwork, and it celebrates the Syrian “victory” in their attack into the Golan Heights in 1973.”
“Very eerily … (there is) some of the same kind of re-crafting and restructuring of the Battle of Taejon. … But in this case, it’s the actual tank battle that unfolds and the Golan Heights in October of 1973. So we can see some definite, definite sort of comparisons between what happens with the memorialization of the 1973 war in Egypt and what is done in Damascus, Syria, ultimately almost 10 years later.”
The popularity of the statues, panoramas, and artwork depicted in war memorials across the Middle East is “a testament to the entrée and the sort of, for lack of a better term, artistic footprint of the North Korean company, Mansudae.
