Search Results for: burma

November 16, 2015

Treasury blocks assets of North Korea’s ambassador to Burma

Although I suppose it’s probably a complete coincidence that Treasury finally blocked the assets of four North Korean proliferators in Burma last Friday, I’d like to think it stung a bit when, a few weeks ago, at this conference at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, I said this: Here’s a link to Treasury’s announcement of the designation of four individual North Koreans, including Pyongyang’s Ambassador to Burma: HWANG, Su Man (a.k.a. HWANG, Kyong Nam); DOB 06 Apr 1955; nationality Korea, North;...

Categories Proliferation/Sanctions/Southeast Asia/WMD
March 4, 2010

4 March 2010: WaPo on North Korea and Burma

It may be almost as revealing as the White House’s concern about growing military (and nuclear?) cooperation between North Korea and Burma that David Albright, asked to comment by the Washington Post, takes a strikingly alarmist point of view about these new developments. Albright, you will recall, had said for years that the Bush Administration had inflated fears that North Korea had an undeclared uranium enrichment program. I don’t suppose that I will ever be in agreement with David Albright...

Categories Anju Links
August 5, 2009

Yesterday Syria, Today Burma, Tomorrow Al Qaeda

The “experts” told us that North Korea would have no reason to threaten us if we’d only “engage,” talk, and appease them. We did, and they sold Syria a nuclear reactor anyway. Others say we should just ignore them. We did, and they’re selling Burma a uranium enrichment program: The two defectors whose briefings have created such alarm are both regarded as credible sources. One was an officer with a secret nuclear battalion in the Burmese army who was sent...

Categories Proliferation/Southeast Asia
June 21, 2009

Not that we should care, but it’s still “illegal” to search North Korean ships on the high seas (Updated: Missiles to Burma?).

Today, a reader and friend e-mailed me and asked whether it would be legal to board and search the Kangnam I on the high seas. Here, slightly paraphrased, is how I responded to that question. As a strictly legal matter, we have no such right. And in the end, so what? First, UNSCR 1874 does not authorize the use of force or the boarding of ships on the high seas, and does not invoke Chapter VII. It requires us to...

Categories Uncategorized
December 12, 2007

House passes Burma sanctions bill

I had given up on the idea that this would ever happen.  Kudos for Tom Lantos: The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on Tuesday blocking imports of Myanmar rubies and removing tax credits for U.S. firms investing in the military-ruled Southeast Asian country. The Block Burmese JADE (Junta’s Anti-Democratic Efforts) Act, drafted after Myanmar’s suppression of pro-democracy protests in September, was approved as the junta rejected a U.N. report putting the death toll from that crackdown at 31....

Categories Southeast Asia
December 7, 2007

Daewoo proudly announces Burma deal, complete absence of business ethics

I suppose, by now, we shouldn’t be surprised that South Korean companies find no regime too murderous or repugnant to do business with, and given the celebratory “tae-han-min-guk” tone this article, South Korean consumers probably won’t object to Daewoo pimping natural gas for the Burmese junta.  I doubt we’ll even hear from our old friend Assemblyman Im Jung In, who briefly halted his support for Kim Jong Il’s agents in the South to denounce Burma’s slightly less horrid atrocities. I...

Categories Human Rights/Southeast Asia
October 20, 2007

Fighting Hard Power With Soft: Sanctions, Iran, and Burma

Burma’s generals, confident that they have reestablished the rule of terror, have just relaxed their  curfews and bans on public assemblies.  It’s exceedingly depressing to write about yet another ongoing atrocity that no one has the courage or vision to really fight, and Burma is another of those atrocities.  If the Administration thinks that modest sanctions like these will end the slaughter, it’s fooling no one: The president directed the government to freeze any U.S.-controlled assets held by 11 senior...

Categories Iran/Southeast Asia/Uncategorized
September 9, 2007

Burma’s Fighting Monks Battle the Generals’ Thugs

Far away and out of notice of the international press, one of the bravest and unlikeliest acts of defiance of recent times has been playing itself out in Central Burma.  And as is so often the case, the spark for political dissent is economic hardship — in this case, a rise in fuel prices: BANGKOK–A standoff between Burmese authorities and hundreds of Buddhist monks in the central city of Pakokku has ended with the release of 13 officials taken hostage...

Categories Southeast Asia
August 5, 2005

Famine in Burma?

Whenever you read that the World Food Program is calling a situation a “food crisis” or “food shortage,” bear in mind that this is how they described the North Korean famine while millions were starving, out of a fear of offending the “host” nation. The reasons for this food shortage, incipient famine, whatever, are also analogous: Mr Morris said the government’s policy of trying to control the economy and the movement of people was to blame for the fact that...

Categories Uncategorized
January 24, 2005

U.S. Citizen and Durihana Activist Missing in Burma

Has South Korea’s new fugitive slave law cost its first life? The Reverend Jeffrey Park is a U.S. citizen and Durihana activist (English language article on them here). A few weeks ago, he was trying to help a group of North Korean refugees get from Jilin, China to South Korea via Burma. The ROK embassy in Rangoon refused to help, so Reverend Park found himself wandering back to China through the dangerous mountains of Laos in the middle of the...

Categories Uncategorized
January 24, 2005

U.S. Citizen and Durihana Activist Missing in Burma

Has South Korea’s new fugitive slave law cost its first life? The Reverend Jeffrey Park is a U.S. citizen and Durihana activist (English language article on them here). A few weeks ago, he was trying to help a group of North Korean refugees get from Jilin, China to South Korea via Burma. The ROK embassy in Rangoon refused to help, so Reverend Park found himself wandering back to China through the dangerous mountains of Laos in the middle of the...

Categories Uncategorized
April 30, 2023

British American Tobacco, North Korea, & the Bomb: Setting a New Low for How Evil a Tobacco Company Can Be

Last Tuesday, British American Tobacco, the world’s second-largest tobacco company, along with its Singaporean subsidiary, pled guilty to bank fraud and conspiracy charges and agreed to pay a combined $635 million in criminal and civil fines, penalties, and forfeitures to the Treasury and Justice Departments. The charges arise from an secret joint venture, going all the way back to 2001, in which BAT sold the North Korean government tobacco, other materials, machinery, and technical help to manufacture cigarettes, despite having said...

Categories Money Laundering/NK Crime/U.S. Law
May 13, 2020

OFAC’s new North Korea (sort of) designations

Today, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control published a colossal list of amendments to the North Korea designations on its list of Specially Designated Nationals—its sanctions blacklist for the financial industry. The amendments are requirements under the new Otto Warmbier North Korea Nuclear Sanctions and Enforcement Act, the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, and the regulations promulgated under those authorities. Today’s announcement is an encouraging sign that the administration is feeling more pressure to enforce these...

Categories Cyberwar/Money Laundering/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
February 14, 2020

Huawei & North Korea: Reading between the lines of EDNY’s new indictment

HUAWEI, WHICH WAS PREVIOUSLY INDICTED FOR eleven counts of conspiracy, bank fraud, wire fraud, violations of Iran sanctions, and money laundering (plus criminal forfeiture counts) now finds itself hit with a superseding indictment for sixteen counts of similar allegations by prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, or EDNY. I’ve always been impressed with the quality of EDNY’s work. It’s a plucky, underrated little office that sits resentfully in the shadow of its more prestigious and prideful neighbor in...

Categories Money Laundering/U.S. Law
April 23, 2019

The “experts” were wrong. The sanctions are working.

The fact that even the New York Times says so didn’t make it so; it just made it harder for people who trust the New York Times to deny it. But for those of us who’ve always put more stock in the Daily NK and Rimjin-gang, the evidence has been piling up for more than a year. Our chronology begins in March 2016, two months after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test and one month after Congress passed the North Korea Sanctions...

Categories Sanctions
April 27, 2018

The Warmbiers sue North Korea

WHILE THE WORLD IS AGOG AT THE SIGHT OF KIM JONG-UN’S impersonation of a human being, Fred and Cindy Warmbier wish to remind you of his true character by sharing with you what their son—or what was left of him—was like when he came home from North Korea. Yesterday, they filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the North Korean government for the wrongful death of Otto Warmbier. I downloaded the complaint from PACER. Warmber...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law