North Korean diplomats behaving badly

If you’re a North Korean diplomat, a good general rule is that all publicity is bad publicity. Over the last two weeks, North Koreans, most of them diplomats or former diplomats, have attracted much publicity of the kind they couldn’t have wanted.

The Chinese government reports that “a North Korean consular official” killed two Chinese citizens while driving home drunk in Dandong last month. The North Korean diplomat was on his way home from an “event celebrating North Korea’s launch of a long-range rocket.” So, that’s another way post-launch events may not have worked out quite as His Porcine Majesty might have hoped.

Also this week, Tanzanian authorities expelled a former North Korean diplomat, Kang Sungguk, for using forged passports and for suspected involvement in various unspecified illegal activities. Prior to 2001, Kang had been an “economic councilor” at the North Korean embassy in Dar-as-Salam. Since then, he had been “a prominent North Korean businessman with supposed diplomatic status who ran several businesses from his base in Guangzhou, China.” It’s always China.

The acting Commissioner of Immigration (Border Management and Control), Wilson Bambaganya, said that immigration officers with support from security officers had been watching Kang closely for sometime and observed his various violations of both national and international laws.

“We (Immigration) gathered information about his habit of changing passports with fake names, different dates of births and numbers,” Bambaganya said. “We asked ourselves what his motives were for constantly forging those details, and we realised that for a person of his status to do such things, he must be engaged in some illegal business, although we couldn’t establish exactly what business.”
When Kang was recently interrogated by immigration officers, he failed to produce any traceable legal business links, which only served to raise more suspicions about him, the senior immigration department official said.

“We even tried to communicate with his country’s embassy here in Tanzania, but they also said they had no proper information about Kang and his current businesses. So we finally decided to expel him via a PI note,” Bambaganya explained.

He added: “Even if he (Kang) was a genuine businessman in China or anywhere else, here in our country we have concluded that he was dealing in illegal business activities.” [IPP Media, via The Guardian]

Last week, Sri Lankan authorities detained two North Koreans for carrying $150,000 in cash. That’s U.S. dollars, in case it matters to you which convertible currency discriminating North Korean money launderers prefer. The two — contra the post title, these two probably were not diplomats — were on their way from Oman to China carrying home “wages earned by themselves as well as other co-workers at construction sites in Oman.” Like many governments, Sri Lanka requires persons carrying more than $10,000 in cash to declare it to the authorities.

In China, the two would presumably have deposited the cash into a bank that would have been willing to scrub the subsequent wire transfers of all references to a North Korean affiliation. Not that any Chinese bank would do that. North Korea has since demanded the release of the men and the return of the money. Because the money consists of proceeds of North Korean labor exports, it’s subject to blocking under Executive Order 13722, but not under U.N. Security Council Resolution 2270 (unless, of course, it’s associated with WMD programs, weapons trafficking, or luxury goods imports).

North Korean consulates are expected to be self-financing, so North Korean diplomats often find themselves placed under arrest in far-flung, exotic locations, like Mozambique, were North Korean diplomat Pak Chol-jun was arrested in May of last year with ten pounds of rhino horn worth $99,300. South Africa later expelled Pak, who was posted at the North Korean embassy in Pretoria.

Just over a year ago, Son Young-nam, the first secretary of the North Korean embassy in Dhaka was arrested by Bangladeshi authorities carrying 59 pounds of gold, worth $1.4 million, which he hadn’t declared to customs. North Korea later apologized, and Bangladesh expelled the diplomat. Gold smuggling is a traditional method for North Korea to evade sanctions and money laundering crackdowns. UNSCR 2270 requires member states to “prohibit the procurement of” gold by North Koreans.

Also on the slave labor front, the Daily NK has an exposé of the role of North Korean consulates in China in procuring human chattels for rental.

“Starting from about a few years ago, officials in the North Korean consulates in China started to provide young female workers to ethnic Korean owned toll processing businesses for a fee. Recently, one such consulate has been receiving a 200-Yuan per month fee in similar transactions with a wig-making factory. The fee in this case is transferred from the worker’s account in accordance with the contract,” a North Korean source currently residing in China reported to Daily NK on March 18.

This development was corroborated by an additional source close to the issue in China.

The brokering of these deals originated in Shenyang, where ethnic Korean managers of seafood processing and packaging, textiles manufacturing, and wig and artificial eyebrow making factories started hiring young, cheap female workers from Pyongyang. The number of Chinese businesses looking to hire young, pretty, 20-something natives of Pyongyang is so large that the consulates have stepped in to facilitate.

Demand from Chinese businesses in the Northeast cities of Jilin, Heilongjiang, and Liaoning quickly built on the momentum, meeting supply from North Korean authorities looking to export labor for a profit. There is a heavy emphasis on beautiful young girls from big cities like the capital. Even now, in the face of strict primary and secondary sanctions targeting the North Korean regime, the demand for young North Korean female workers has not abated. [Daily NK]

If a plain-looking woman can pack seafood or knit a wig just as efficiently as a pretty one can, it’s unclear why the Chinese employers put such a premium on appearance unless they intend to exploit the women sexually. This goes unstated in the article, but previous reports have alleged that North Korean managers had pimped out female North Korean workers in a food processing plant in Donggang.

Finally, a number of sources are reporting that two countries are about to expel North Korean diplomats who’ve been designated by the U.N. Security Council. North Korea has replaced its Ambassador to Burma after the Security Council designated the incumbent, Kim Sok-chol. The U.S. Treasury Department designated Kim last November for activities on behalf of the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation, or KOMID, a trading company designated for proliferation.

Egypt is also said to be about to expel North Korean Ambassador Pak Chun-il after his designation. Pak allegedly “played a key role in establishing an Egyptian branch of … KOMID,” and was involved in weapons smuggling and other illegal activities. Egypt has recently come up in multiple reports on North Korea sanctions violations, and was mentioned in the most recent U.N. Panel of Experts report. Last November, the U.S. Treasury Department designated Eko Development and Investment Company, a/k/a, Eko Development and Investment Food Company, a/k/a Eko Import and Export Company, a North Korean trading company based in Cairo, for being a KOMID front. Treasury also designated Egypt-based Ri Won Ho last week, when it first published Executive Order 13722. Treasury describes Ri as “an official of the DPRK’s Ministry of State Security based in Egypt” who was working for KOMID.

Last month, investigative journalist George Turner revealed that Egyptian-U.S. dual national Naguib Sawaris of Orascom/Koryolink infamy was in partnership with North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank, designated by Treasury for proliferation, through the Orascom-linked, North Korean-chartered Orabank.