June 2, 2016

The Treasury Department just went full Alderaan on North Korea (updated)

For decades, North Korean drug dealers, counterfeiters, proliferators, arms dealers, money launderers, and most recently, bank burglars have used our financial system to move their profits into the regime’s offshore bank accounts, or into casinos. For years, the U.S. Treasury Department had to fight Pyongyang’s abuse of the financial system with its hands cuffed behind its back by the State Department, which sought a deal with Pyongyang at almost any cost. But yesterday, in a move that was at least...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
May 31, 2016

How much have sanctions affected PUST? Not enough, apparently.

Chan-Mo Park, the Chancellor of the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, or PUST, and a U.S. citizen, is blaming South Korean bilateral sanctions for his difficulties recruiting new academic talent. He told VOA on Wednesday, “We want to recruit South Korean professors, but the May 24 measure blocks it.” He was referring to trade and exchange sanctions South Korea made against North Korea on May 24, 2010. The sanctions came after South Korea accused the North of sinking one...

Categories Cyberwar
May 27, 2016

Global wave of bank burglaries should revive calls to kick N. Korea out of SWIFT

In recent weeks, I’ve watched with keen interest, and some schadenfreude, as news reports have implicated Pakistani and North Korean hackers in a series of massive bank burglaries involving as many as 12 banks around the world, starting with the theft of $81 million (or $101 million, depending on which report you believe) from the Bangladesh Bank’s account in the U.S. Federal Reserve. These burglaries did not involve guns or ski masks. They were something more like armored car burglaries,...

Categories Money Laundering/NK Crime/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
May 23, 2016

Stop saying N. Korean overseas laborers aren’t slaves. They are, and here’s proof.

You absolutely must watch this extraordinary work of investigative journalism by Vice, exposing the North Korean slave labor racket in Poland. There are English subtitles available. What is so exceptional about this reporting is that its detailed and careful investigation makes it immediately actionable. With a little googling, it’s possible to identify the names, position titles, and e-mail addresses of the Polish and North Korean companies involved. That’s enough for the Treasury Department to add all of them to the...

Categories China/Europe/Human Trafficking
May 20, 2016

N. Korea sanctions update: I sense a great disturbance in the force, as if billions of dollars cried out in terror and were suddenly frozen.

[First, thank you for your patience with the light blogging recently. Most of my limited spare time has been consumed by a project that must take a higher priority than this site. That project has been perpetually at the verge of completion for weeks now, but should be done soon.] North Korea’s fourth nuclear test in January was a watershed in sanctions law and policy. Until then, the U.S. and the U.N. had mostly pretended to have tough sanctions against North...

Categories "United" Nations/Money Laundering/Sanctions
May 15, 2016

New bipartisan bill raises pressure on State Dep’t to list N. Korea as a terror sponsor

As readers of this site know, President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” That position is spurious. The evidence of North Korea’s sponsorship of terrorism is overwhelming. It includes shipments of arms to Hezbollah and Hamas,...

Categories Terrorism (NK)
May 6, 2016

No Pyongyang Spring this year, either

The reasons why North Korea is holding a party congress are still a matter of conjecture to those of us fortunate enough not to live there. The congress is almost certainly related to Kim Jong-un’s consolidation of power in some way. It will probably reinforce the personality cult. The regime’s organization charts and wiring diagrams may be rearranged. Pessimists suspect that there will be more bloody purges or another nuclear test. Optimists still hold hope that His Corpulency will validate...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology/Media Criticism
May 3, 2016

Who killed Pastor Han Chung-ryeol?

Since 1993, Pastor Han Chung-ryeol, an ethnic Korean citizen of China, had operated a church with 300 members at the foot of Mount Changbai, which the Koreans call Mount Paektu, on the Chinese side of the border. NK News reports that Pastor Han was last seen leaving his church at 2:00 on Saturday afternoon. He was found on the side of the Mountain at 8:00 that evening, “with knife and axe wounds in his neck.” Someone murdered Pastor Han, and not without...

Categories Terrorism (NK)
May 2, 2016

Preparations for North Korea’s party congress spur anger, resistance, and dissent

Over the last year, this site has closely tracked growing signs that North Korea’s elites are discontented with Kim Jong-un’s leadership and fearful of being purged, and of falling morale and discipline in the North Korean military. More recently, we’ve seen extraordinary outbreaks of dissent among North Korea’s overseas workers, including the group defection of 13 restaurant workers and a reported mutiny by 100 workers in Kuwait. Whether these incidents reflect popular sentiment inside North Korea itself is a harder question to...

Categories Capitalism/Class Warfare/Resistance
April 28, 2016

Claudia Rosett: Shipping sanctions against North Korea are leaking

Unlike my friend, Claudia Rosett, I’d call the new U.N. sanctions against North Korea a qualified success, despite the fact that implementation is still a work in progress. This post, and the other posts it links, summarize the effects of just one aspect of the sanctions — their restrictions on North Korean shipping, which have idled dozens of North Korean ships. Since then, NK News’s Leo Byrne has reported that no North Korean ships have called in the port of Dandong...

Categories Shipping sanctions
April 26, 2016

Report: 100 North Korean workers in Kuwait protest unpaid wages

Because North Korea is so uniquely opaque and repressive, it’s often difficult to gauge the level of dissent against, or popular support for, its regime. That repression follows North Koreans when they’re sent abroad to earn money for the regime, usually through the implied threat to punish the workers’ loved ones back in North Korea if they step out of line.  The recent and unprecedented mass defection of 13 restaurant workers from Ningpo, China, is an example of this. In...

Categories Resistance
April 21, 2016

The North Korean Army’s rape epidemic

A few days ago, the Korea Times carried a profile of Lee So-yeon, a native of Hoeryong in North Korea’s far northeast, who defected to the South in 2008, did menial jobs for a few years, later earned her bachelor’s degree in social welfare from Gukje Cyber University based in Suwon, and then founded an NGO called the North Korea Women’s Union. Founded in 2011, the group hosts talks at schools and other groups, and provides job training and psychological...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/NK Military
April 20, 2016

Pyongyang’s sanctions are the ones that hurt the North Korean people the most.

Last month, I wrote about one slightly surprising consequence of sanctions against North Korea — sanctions have prevented Kim Jong-un from selling off and exporting resources needed by the North Korean people, which has flooded North Korean markets with cheap coal and seafood. Now, we’re starting to see something like the converse of this, in which restrictions on what North Korea’s donju and purchasing agents can import is forcing them to find other ways to kick up steep “loyalty payments”...

Categories Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
April 18, 2016

Dear President Park: Make Reunification Your Legacy

Last week was a tough week for Park Geun-hye, when her party lost its majority in the National Assembly. The simplest explanation for this is that historically, ruling parties usually take beatings in mid-term elections, particularly when their own voters don’t show up to vote. The ruling party may poll well in the abstract, but a party that enters an election divided is likely to underperform expectations.  Republicans, take note. And don’t look so smug, Democrats. Something like this appears...

Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/Propaganda/Reconstruction/Subversion
April 13, 2016

Dozens of North Korean ships stranded by U.N. sanctions

Since this year’s nuclear test and the rounds of U.S. and U.N. sanctions that followed, I’ve tracked the implementation and enforcement of shipping sanctions closely on this site. For ease of reference, here’s a brief chronology of what I’ve observed since March 2, 2016, when the U.N. Security Council approved Resolution 2270, which — required the inspection of all cargo to and from North Korea; banned the reflagging of North Korean ships; banned exports of coal and iron ore (except...

Categories Shipping sanctions
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
April 12, 2016

If Kim Jong-un can’t trust his own spies and assassins, who can he trust? (updates)

The revelation last weekend that a colonel in North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, or RGB, defected to South Korea last year represents a huge potential windfall in uncovering North Korea’s operations in the South. Reuters quotes Yonhap as reporting that the colonel “specialized in anti-South espionage operations before defecting and had divulged the nature of his work to South Korean authorities.” The Korea Herald, also citing Yonhap, reports that he gave “detailed testimony†on RGB operations in the South. Or...

Categories Defectors/Human Trafficking/Refugees