Who Needs the Proliferation Security Initiative?

The idea behind the PSI was to interdict North Korea’s trade in weapons and dope, but few would doubt that another purpose is to crimp the regime’s foreign exchange receipts. Yet even while the Bush administration has yet to go full-tilt on PSI enforcement, North Korea seems to be doing a fine job of crimping its own foreign trade by losing ships at an alarming rate. They’ve already lost two in the last week alone.

First, from off the Chinese coast, we learn that a North Korean ship carrying iron ore sank, with the loss of 23 of 35 crew members aboard, including 18 missing and presumed dead. This Web site, which tracks shipwrecks worldwide, identifies the ship as the Ta Mak Gol, built in 1984, weighing 6,711 gross tons.

Yesterday, the wire services carried this report of a North Korean-owned, but mostly Romanian-crewed ship, the Lujin II, sinking after running into rocks off the Algerian coast. Five Romanian crew members were lost, and four other persons were missing. A Spanish helicopter and Algerian sailors managed to save 14 others.

The same shipwreck site also listed three wrecks in 2004. The first of these was the passenger vessel Sontong-5, which ran aground with 24 North Korean citizens aboard in the Kurile Islands–more of those disputed islands in the North Pacific (Russia holds them; Japan claims them). While the passengers and crew waited out a storm for two days, workers on shore tried to establish radio contact, but to no avail. The radios worked fine, but no one on shore spoke Korean, and no one on the ship spoke English or French. The ship appears to have been salvageable, and no lives appear to have been lost. More. In February, the cargo ship Tor 3 ran aground at the Turkish port of Mersin with the loss of 1,800 tons of limestone and, in all likelihood, the ship, which suffered severe damage. In September, the North Korean-flagged, 1,400-ton Ostria, carrying marble from Egypt to Albania, sank in a storm in the Aegean. All 15 crew members were rescued. More.

According to Global Security, North Korea owned 76 cargo vessels in April 2004, of which 10 are under direct control of the North Korean military. Make that 73, unless the North Koreans keep the one that a drunk sailed to the Workers’ Paradise today.