Search Results for: uganda

July 1, 2016

Sanctions Diplomacy: Yesterday Uganda, today Namibia, tomorrow Cambodia

Earlier this week, when a senior Namibian official who had defended her government’s military cooperation with North Korea showed up in Pyongyang, I conceded that she could be there to terminate that cooperation, but didn’t assess that possibility as very likely. But yesterday, the Namibian government announced it was ending its joint projects with North Korea, including a North Korean-run arms factory, to comply with new U.N. sanctions: “The Government of the Republic of Namibia, in fulfilling her international obligations...

Categories Africa/Sanctions/Southeast Asia
November 11, 2014

Uganda is violating U.N. sanctions against North Korea

When North Korea sends its diplomats to Africa, presumably to ask for their votes against a General Assembly resolution that would refer Kim Jong Un to the ICC, I hope it sends at least some of the same diplomats who called Botswana’s U.N. Ambassador a “black bastard,” if only to show the hypocrisy of the African leaders who received them: President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda gave a state banquet late Thursday in honor of North Korea’s ceremonial head of state,...

Categories Africa/Sanctions
April 11, 2018

Using the law to break Africa’s addiction to North Korean weapons

When Africa binges on North Korean weapons, it doesn’t just deprive Africa of resources its people need for development; it fuels conflict and human rights abuses by some of the world’s most despotic governments. It also finances and encourages Pyongyang’s militarist reunification drive, and helps it buy more weapons for its generals to point at and terrorize South Korean cities. As with arms purchases by Syria, arms sales to Africa are a major hole in our sanctions that the Trump...

Categories Africa/Arms Trafficking
December 5, 2017

So, who else has cut trade with North Korea lately, and who still hasn’t?

With the pace of news of North Korea sanctions news lately, my bookmarks folder is starting to look like what the paramedics found at the Cat Lady’s house after the neighbors noticed a foul odor. Today, I want to catch up with our efforts to deny Pyongyang a haven for its money laundering network, with a focus on Southeast Asia. To review the administration’s progress since January, you may want to start here and here. Ambassador Nikki Haley also gave...

Categories Arms Trafficking/Diplomacy/Sanctions/Southeast Asia
October 25, 2017

Congress to Tillerson: Put North Korea back on the list of sponsors of terrorism

I won’t belabor the point of why North Korea should be on the list (well, maybe just a little). The better question is why, eight months, a nuclear test, two U.N. Security Council resolutions, and one public WMD-enabled assassination after Donald Trump’s inauguration, it isn’t already on that list. One growing line of speculation is that Tillerson, for all his unpopularity at Foggy Bottom, has gone native there. This sentiment comes from thoughtful and influential conservative members of Congress, not...

Categories Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law
August 23, 2017

FBI, Treasury & DOJ hit N. Korean enablers with secondary sanctions, forfeitures

Two months ago, the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) released its groundbreaking report, “Risky Business,” which used open-source business records to trace the 5,233 companies that (according to C4ADS) comprise nearly the entirety of North Korea’s “limited, centralized, and vulnerable” financial networks in China. At the time, I speculated that we hadn’t heard the last word from the FBI, the Treasury Department, and Justice Department, and yesterday, my suspicions were confirmed. First, Treasury designated a series of North Korean, Chinese, and Russian...

Categories Arms Trafficking/Money Laundering/Sanctions
January 4, 2017

Yun Byung-se, The Indispensable Man

Park Geun-hye, the cautious triangulatrix who belatedly became South Korea’s most subversive (to North Korea) president for two decades, is all but gone, and almost everyone in South Korea is applauding. None, however, have applauded with as much enthusiasm as those on South Korea’s far left, who fill a spectrum between anti-anti-North Korean and violently pro-North Korean. The left now senses that it has an advantage headed into next year’s presidential campaign and hopes to end Seoul’s campaign of diplomatic...

Categories Africa/Diplomacy/Human Trafficking/Sanctions
December 2, 2016

Why Seoul’s blacklisting of Air Koryo & Dandong Hongxiang matters

South Korea is the first of the Free Three (the U.S., South Korea, and Japan) to announce independent multilateral sanctions on North Korea following the approval of UNSCR 2321. Some of the measures, such as the blacklisting of Choe Ryong-hae and Hwang Pyong-so, will probably mean almost nothing until some future left-wing president tries to give one of them a ticker-tape parade along the Chongro. An extension of South Korea’s ban on ships that have entered North Korean ports within...

Categories China & Korea/Korean Politics/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
August 11, 2016

Angola is playing fast and loose with North Korea sanctions

Like its neighbor, Namibia, Angola aligned with the Soviet block during the Cold War. The Angolan government and the Namibian rebel movement, the South West Africa Peoples’ Organization or SWAPO, received military assistance from Cuba, which had up to 60,000 soldiers near Angola’s border with Namibia during a vicious set of guerrilla wars in the 1990s. The Soviet Union is gone, but historic alliances can be persistent things, especially when those alliances also come with financial ties. This has certainly...

Categories Africa/Arms Trafficking/Sanctions
July 19, 2016

Andrei Lankov doesn’t really know if North Korea sanctions are working

It’s no secret that I’ve been a skeptic of “engagement” with Pyongyang from the very beginning, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Andrei Lankov. His Korea Times columns, his book, and his other writings on social, historical, and political matters have been so useful that I often cite them, despite his unrealized predictions or the silly things he occasionally writes. His view of engagement isn’t just the conventional approach of wheeling a catapult up the DMZ and flinging bundles of unmarked...

Categories Appeasement/Sanctions
July 15, 2016

When Kim Jong-un nukes off — and he will — here’s how we should respond (updated)

The U.N. Security Council was already meeting about how to respond to North Korea’s latest missile tests when Pyongyang drew the curtain on its next act of satellite theater at Punggye-ri. Even without the latest sanctions, His Corpulency would probably have carried out another nuke test within the next year, if only to help consolidate his rule, and because the U.S. and South Korea are holding presidential elections. (North Korean dictators prefer to nuke off as new administrations assemble their...

Categories Sanctions
July 11, 2016

U.S. joins diplomatic squeeze on North Korean labor exports

Last week, the Leiden Asia Centre made headlines around the world with the release of its exhaustive, 115-page report, “Slaves to the System,” on North Korea’s overseas labor arrangements and how those laborers are treated. The Leiden report coincides with new diplomatic efforts by the U.S., South Korea, and now, the International Labor Organization to bring those arrangements to an end. The Chosun Ilbo reports that the U.S. government “is preparing a series of reports on the abuse of North Koreans...

Categories Diplomacy/Human Trafficking/Sanctions
July 7, 2016

The designation of His Corpulency for human rights abuses is symbolic. Powerfully symbolic.

About a week later than my prediction in this post and a full decade after it should have done so, the Treasury Department has finally designated His Porcine Majesty, ten of his worst henchmen, and nine government agencies for human rights abuses. “Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea continues to inflict intolerable cruelty and hardship on millions of its own people, including extrajudicial killings, forced labor, and torture,” said Adam J. Szubin, Acting Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence....

Categories Human Rights/Sanctions
June 9, 2016

A strike by North Korean workers in Kuwait portends a dark fate for them, and for Kim Jong-un.

I first learned that North Korea had exported laborers to Kuwait when I heard that those workers were providing thirsty locals with a valuable public service by brewing black-market moonshine for them. Then, in April, a report emerged that seemed almost too remarkable to be true — 100 North Korean workers in Kuwait had mutinied against their minders to protest the extra work and unpaid wages coincident to the “70-day battle” leading up to North Korea’s party congress in May. (In...

Categories Human Trafficking/Resistance
June 7, 2016

RFA: Poland to stop granting work visas to N. Korean laborers

Last month, I wrote about Vice’s must-see investigative documentary on North Korean workers in Poland and the exploitative and unsafe conditions in which they work for little or no pay. Via Yonhap, Radio Free Asia now quotes South Korean Foreign Ministry Spokesman Cho June-hyuck as saying that Poland will stop granting new work visas and renewing existing visas to workers from North Korea. “The issue of overseas North Korean workers has increasingly caused concern within the international community from the perspective...

Categories Europe/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/Sanctions
May 25, 2016

Seoul’s diplomacy targets North Korea’s arms trade in Africa

Just last week, I wrote that South Korea’s diplomatic efforts to secure compliance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 2270 were putting ours to shame. Seoul is now offering fresh evidence of this by doing what I’ve said for weeks that our own diplomats should be doing — going on tour in Africa to pressure defense ministries to stop buying from Pyongyang. Seoul’s direct approach to two countries with close military ties to Pyongyang highlights its push to stem North Korea’s...

Categories Africa/Arms Trafficking
April 12, 2016

Angola may be defying U.N. sanctions against North Korea

A report last month by the U.N. Panel of Experts found that Namibia has been involved in joint projects with KOMID, a designated North Korean entity, to build an arms factory in the African nation. The finding drew a defiant response from the Namibian government, but as a defense to a sanctions violation, it was a blue answer to a red question. In response, I wrote this post — which attracted much attention in Windhoek — rebutting Namibia’s argument and explaining...

Categories Africa/Arms Trafficking
March 9, 2016

N. Korea sanctions are failing because of China. That’s why we need secondary sanctions.

Last November, I put up a post cataloging China’s long and deep history of breaking U.N. sanctions against North Korea. The post, which relied heavily on reports of the U.N. Panel of Experts monitoring North Korea sanctions, attracted a great deal of attention, including from Senate staff as they considered the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act. The new POE report, released yesterday, is almost 300 pages long (including exhibits) and has more than enough material to make a rich...

Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Sanctions