Swiss sold N. Korea $180K in cigarette-making machinery as aid agencies begged for donations

The communist country’s imports of Swiss tobacco machinery components reached US$180,000 in the January-June period, far more than the $24,000 worth of imports recorded for all of 2013, according to the report by the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA). [….]

The country imported $65.28 million of tobacco in 2013, about 77.8 times what the country sold overseas, the report showed. [Yonhap]

On the plus side, the trade statistics also show that during the first six months of this year, North Korea purchased no Swiss watches for the first time in recent history. That’s a welcome improvement, but if ski lift equipment is a luxury item that’s inappropriate to sell to North Korea, then how on earth can it be appropriate to sell it cigarette-making equipment?

That’s doubly so in light of long-standing suspicions of North Korea’s involvement in the counterfeiting of cigarettes. Trafficking in counterfeit cigarettes is a criminal offense under the U.S. Code, punishable by 10 years in prison and the forfeiture of any property involved in the offense. In that sense, the sales can be viewed similarly to Switzerland’s sale of intaglio presses and optically variable ink to North Korea — as another expression of irresponsible profiteering by a country whose export controls seldom seem to recognize law, common sense, or humanitarian responsibility.

Europe’s responsibility to the North Korean people will not end when China and Russia veto the EU-drafted resolution at the Security Council, as they surely will. European nations, both EU and non-EU, have a duty to stop helping Kim Jong Un misuse North Korea’s resources while another generation of North Koreans is starved and stunted by hunger. It must force Kim Jong Un to make better decisions about the use of North Korea’s resources by enforcing the spirit and letter of U.N. sanctions, by cracking down on luxury goods exports, and by restricting Pyongyang’s use of the slush funds that sit in European banks.