Search Results for: luxury

August 4, 2015

Switzerland sells luxury watches to Kim Jong-Un, despite U.N. sanctions and food shortages

Throughout North Korea’s Great Famine, as millions of North Koreans either starved to death or watched their loved ones die, suppliers across Europe willingly sold Kim Jong-Il millions of dollars’ worth of luxury cars, yachts, cognac, and Swiss watches. In 2006, the U.N. Security Council recognized the obscenity of this practice by adopting Resolution 1718, which first banned the export of luxury goods to North Korea. Among European nations, probably none has done more than Switzerland to enable the democidal kleptocracy of...

Categories Europe/Luxury Goods
October 28, 2014

On Europe, the U.N., luxury goods, and the ethical limits of engagement.

The latest rant from Professor Lee and me is published here, on CNN International, in the hope that it will catch the eyes of European audiences (and maybe even give Felix Abt a migraine). Mind you, I think the EU’s leadership of the U.N. response to the Commission of Inquiry report has been commendable, but Europe has to do a better job of enforcing U.N. sanctions, and curbing the actions of unethical profiteers who would sell Kim Jong Un cigarette-making...

Categories Europe/Luxury Goods
October 14, 2014

If Yoon Sang-Hyun’s information is correct, North Korea spends six times as much on luxury goods as on food for its hungry (corrected).

South Korean Saenuri Party lawmaker Yoon Sang-Hyun, citing Chinese Customs data and “studies on North Korean trade patterns” compiled by the National Intelligence Service South Korean government,* has leaked a report alleging that in 2013, Pyongyang imported $644 million in luxury goods. Yoon says this is enough to buy “more than 3.66 million tons of corn or 1.52 million tons of rice, far more than the country’s food shortage of 340,000 tons estimated by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
January 11, 2014

Hey … isn’t that video of Dennis Rodman personally giving banned luxury goods to Kim Jong Un?

Skip to the two-minute mark. Well, that certainly looks incriminating. (Hat tip to a reader.) [I guess he picked the wrong week to quit drinking.] If you haven’t read my post explaining the ban on importing luxury goods to North Korea, you should probably start there.* And since you ask, yes, as a matter of fact, I do believe the bottles are engraved with likenesses of Kim and Rodman. Just to be clear, I don’t think Dennis Rodman should do time over five bottles of liquor,...

Categories Sanctions/Sports/Useful Idiocy
January 7, 2014

Source: Dennis Rodman brought luxury gifts to Kim Jong Un (and that’s punishable by 20 years in prison).

Writing at The Weekly Standard today, Dennis Halpin informs us that Dennis Rodman (no relation) was bringing more than his august presence to Kim Jong Un’s birthday party. Halpin, citing a “diplomatic source” he understandably won’t name but says is reliable, claims that Rodman was also carrying “several hundred dollars’ worth of Irish Jameson whiskey,” “European crystal, an Italian suit for him, and Italian clothing, a fur coat, and an English Mulberry handbag” for Kim’s wife, Ri Sol Ju. The level...

Categories Sanctions/Useful Idiocy
December 5, 2006

Kremlinology, Luxury Goods, and Stolen Rice

I don’t expect Resolution 1718’s luxury goods ban to have much of a  short-term impact on North Korea, beyond focusing attention  on all of the frivolous things Kim Jong Il would rather buy than rice.   For the longer term, however, Korea watcher Ken Gause, in what is probably the definitive work of North Korean Kremlinology (ht) did a pretty good job before-the-fact of explaining the gradual trends we seem to be hoping we can advance (Gause actually  spends almost none...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Kim Jong Il/Korean Politics/Kremlinology
July 21, 2020

Our S Korean ally has a plan to bail Kim Jong-un out, but it’s no better than the rest of them

I really think South Korean President Moon Jae-in wants to bail Kim Jong-un out more than I want my next breath. Even before he was sworn in, he called for the reopening of Kaesong and other joint projects to ease the burden of U.S.-led sanctions. Once in office, he called for major investments in North Korea until a call from the Treasury Department scared his bankers away. He turned a blind eye to purchases of North Korean coal, and probably to the smuggling of luxury goods, into...

Categories An Alliance?/Sanctions
October 30, 2019

Report: Kim Jong-un starves his people, America blamed, women hardest hit

It has now been five years since a U.N. Commission of Inquiry found exhaustive evidence of Pyongyang’s culpability for “crimes against humanity, arising from ‘policies established at the highest level of State,’” including “the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.” It has been less than a year since Human Rights Watch interviewed dozens of witnesses to find that North Korea’s government has built a pervasive culture of rape, where officials prey on women with impunity. But now, a group...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Propaganda/Useful Idiocy
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
March 18, 2019

Chollima Civil Defense just became a serious threat to Kim Jong-un’s misrule (Update: No, it didn’t.)

Update: As of today, it looks like most of what we’ve read about this story was untrue — starting with the lack of evidence that any of the people involved were even North Koreans. They appear to have been U.S., South Korean, and Mexican nationals instead. They aren’t going to publish what they found on the computers, either. They just handed them over to the FBI, which potentially puts the FBI in the difficult position of holding property stolen from...

Categories Resistance
March 6, 2019

Congress is losing confidence in Trump & Treasury on North Korea sanctions

Yesterday, Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) introduced a new version of the Otto Warmbier Banking Restrictions Involving North Korea, or BRINK Act, which I wrote about here in 2017. You can read the two Senators’ summaries of the bill here and here. Otto’s parents also provided a supportive statement. Congress’s patience, which has long been near a breaking point, has reached it. Perhaps it’s not completely fair that Trump is now reaping the frustrations that were...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
February 20, 2019

Save Congress a Seat at Hanoi: On North Korea, Sanctions, Treaties & Politics

WHO STILL BELIEVES THAT DONALD TRUMP IS THE GREAT NEGOTIATOR HE CLAIMS TO BE? Certainly not Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, or Mitch McConnell. Certainly not Kim Jong-un. Certainly not the people doing the most futile job inside the Beltway right now–writing Donald Trump’s intelligence assessments about North Korea, or of just what he persuaded Kim Jong-un to do at Singapore. Drink a toast to them. Better yet, buy them one. Many people in government now, up to and including John...

Categories Diplomacy/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
January 11, 2019

How to make Kaesong a safety valve for sanctions and a(nother) test of engagement

Fifteen years after the opening of Kaesong and more than twelve years after the approval of UNSCR 1718, Seoul has finally gotten around to reading the resolution that Kaesong violated for a decade. As I’ve harped on during that entire period, paragraph 8(d) required Seoul to “ensure” that its bulk dollar transfers to Pyongyang, which it deceptively called “wages,” were not diverted for nukes, missiles, or luxury goods. No matter how obnoxiously I would present that question to the South...

Categories Kaesong
December 3, 2018

Of course, Kim Jong-un’s tourist resorts will fail. Of course, we can help with that.

The following question is multiple choice. Please do not use a number two pencil to blacken the oval on your screen. In April, angry, hungry citizens in North Korea’s remote Ryanggang Province took the brave and desperate step of protesting to local authorities over forced “donations” of food, money, and supplies they were required to make to the construction of — (a) an orphanage (b) a grain elevator (c) a soy-based infant formula factory (d) a beach resort If you...

Categories Human Trafficking/Sanctions/Sunshine/U.S. Law
November 19, 2018

How engaging the wrong North Koreans set back openness, reform & peace

South Korea’s social-nationalist government, joined by too many Western academics of the sort who bask in its generosity and fear the withdrawal of it, has re-embraced the “Sunshine” hypothesis. This hypothesis equates nearly all economic “engagement” with North Korea’s military-industrial complex — also known as “the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” — with economic openness, and economic openness with political openness, disarmament, prosperity, and peace. The Western exemplar of no-questions-asked engagement is the NGO and media darling known as Choson...

Categories North-South/Sunshine
April 25, 2018

Steve Mnuchin is defying Congress & undermining the President’s North Korea policy

WHO, EXACTLY, DOES STEVE MNUCHIN THINK HE WORKS FOR—Donald Trump or Xi Jinping? We are just weeks away from a scheduled meeting between the President who appointed Mnuchin and the dictator of North Korea. That meeting may decide whether it’s still possible to disarm the North through diplomacy instead of a war that could easily go nuclear. Unlike every other U.S. president since there has been a North Korea, President Trump grasps that the prerequisite to a successful negotiation is...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law