March 9, 2015

Why legal investments in North Korea are a money laundering risk

You’ve often seen me write about the importance of “financial transparency” in transactions with North Korea. For a decade, economic engagement has mostly been done by one of two models: (1) controlled interactions with members of the elite, the actual effects of which are negligible at best; and (2) barbed-wire capitalism, where a few North Korean officials relay orders from foreign managers to hand-picked workers, and where the regime seals the whole enterprise off to prevent it from influencing the local community. The former are, for the most part, of little...

Categories Engagement/Kaesong/Money Laundering/Sanctions/Sunshine
March 5, 2015

N. Korea’s support for slashing of U.S. Amb’r might be state sponsorship of terrorism

Yonhap and The Washington Post are reporting that North Korea’s official “news” agency, the Korean Central News Agency or KCNA, has expressed its support for an extremist’s slashing of U.S. Ambassador Mark Lippert yesterday, calling it “a just punishment.” You won’t find those words in the English version of KCNA’s report, whose headline is a dry, “U.S. Ambassador Attacked by S. Korean,” although you will see that KCNA spelled the Ambassador’s name “Report.” The Korean-language headline of the same article, however, translates to something like, “Act of...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Terrorism (NK)/The Fifth Column
March 4, 2015

Breaking: U.S. Ambassador to S. Korea slashed by guy who really hates bloodshed

Here’s a link to the story, and here’s a picture: Picture released of injured U.S. ambassador Lippert on YTN pic.twitter.com/ztxS3QzwmH – Mark Broome (@mark_arirang) March 4, 2015 Hat tip to Sung Yoon Lee. More to follow, but initial word I’m hearing suggests a political motive. ~ ~ ~ Update 1: AFP’s report has more details. Seoul (AFP) – The US ambassador to South Korea, Mark Lippert, was injured in an attack by a razor-wielding assailant Thursday in Seoul, police and...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Society/The Fifth Column
March 4, 2015

North Korea evades U.N. sanctions with shell games, spell games, and whack-a-mole

On any given day, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control may publish several pages of new designations for the list of Specially Designated Nationals. Inevitably, most of the designations will be designations of aliases. That’s because one of the oldest sanctions-evasion tricks is renaming an entity, so that when banks type its name into their software, they don’t get a hit that might warn them to decline the transaction, block the account, or file a Suspicious Activity Report....

Categories "United" Nations/Proliferation/Sanctions/WMD
March 3, 2015

Yes, North Korea is still using the dollar system to launder its money.

The Financial Action Task Force has re-issued its call for “countermeasures” against the risks of money laundering and terrorist financing emanating from North Korea. The FATF’s call is not significantly different from advisories the FATF has issued since 2011, but it is significant in one way. More sensible Korea-watchers are accustomed to the pavlovian response of the South Korean press, and of certain American academics, whenever North Korea hints at being willing to talk. We saw this again after Kim Jong Un’s New Year speech, which...

Categories "United" Nations/Money Laundering/Sanctions
March 2, 2015

North Korea’s arms trade flourishes as U.S. diplomacy falters

The latest U.N. Panel of Experts report is a bleak one for the U.N., and for an Obama Administration that seems content to outsource its policy to it. North Korea shows no sign of complying with the resolutions, and every sign of pursuing its WMD programs at full speed. Yongbyon was active for a while last year, and as recently as last September, there were signs of new excavation at North Korea’s nuclear test site at Punggye-ri. North Korea has improved...

Categories "United" Nations/Sanctions
February 27, 2015

So, what “appropriate measures” *did* the feds take against Dennis Rodman for violating N. Korea sanctions?

The newest U.N. Panel of Experts report* on North Korea sanctions enforcement contains this buried treasure: The first question this raises is what those appropriate measures were. The use of passive voice conceals whether the feds took any measures at all. The second question is why there should be a “lack of information” from Rodman, when the Commerce and Treasury Departments have subpoena powers and an obligation to cooperate with U.N. authorities enforcing North Korea sanctions. The law applies to...

Categories Luxury Goods/Sanctions/Useful Idiocy
February 26, 2015

UN POE Report: North Korean spies infiltrated UNESCO, World Food Program

I’ll just let you read what the POE’s draft report says for yourself: Well, that might explain a few things. For those who don’t know, the Reconnaissance General Bureau handles most of North Korea’s clandestine foreign intelligence work. It is sanctioned by the Treasury Department. It is suspected of being behind the Rangoon Bombing in 1983, KAL 858 bombing in 1987, a series of attempted and completed assassinations of activists and defectors, and the Sony hack and threats. RGB agents may have also crewed the...

Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid
February 25, 2015

Kim Jong Un seeks friends and funds abroad as he isolates his people.

In the three years that he has been in power, His Porcine Majesty has found plenty of time for Dennis Rodman, but none for meetings with foreign leaders. Suddenly, in the last two months, he has flirted with (1) a summit with South Korean leader Park Geun-Hye, (2) inviting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Pyongyang, (3) and a visit to Vladimir Putin in Moscow in May. His central bank even “committed itself to implementing the action plan of ‘international...

Categories Capitalism/China & Korea/Class Warfare/Diplomacy/Russia & Korea/Sanctions
February 23, 2015

Under NKSEA, transactions in N. Korean slave labor would be punishable by prison time

Yet again, a news story is reporting that North Korea is sending workers abroad to toil in conditions tantamount to slavery: When the North Korean carpenter was offered a job in Kuwait in 1996, he leapt at the chance. He was promised $120 a month, an unimaginable wage for most workers in his famine-stricken country, where most people are not allowed to travel abroad. But for Rim Il, the deal soured from the start: Under a moonlit night, the bus carrying him and...

Categories Human Trafficking
February 19, 2015

More food for hungry North Koreans is not “bad news” for sanctions proponents.

I don’t always agree with Scott Snyder’s views, but I’ve always enjoyed reading his work. In almost every case, I’ve found it to be well-researched and objective. In a blog post for the Council on Foreign Relations, Snyder cautiously concludes that North’s cereal production is “stable and improving” — from 5.93 million tons last year to 5.94 million tons this year, a more generous characterization than the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization report he cites, which calls North Korea’s food production “stagnant.”...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
February 18, 2015

Once again, North Korea threatens free speech here in the United States

On December 19, 2014, in response to the FBI’s conclusion that North Korea was behind the threats against audiences for “The Interview,” President Obama said, “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.” After all, the President reasoned, “if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t...

Categories Censorship/Terrorism (NK)
February 17, 2015

N. Korea Perestroika Watch: Woman sent to firing squad for “gambling and drug use”

Did you hear the one about how Amerikkka’s prisons are filled with small-time drug offenders? Well, the workers’ paradise has solved that problem: In mid-November 2014 in Sinuiju, North Pyongan Province, a woman in her 50s considered part of the donju [new affluent middle class] was publicly executed for “gambling and drug use,” Daily NK has recently learned. According to Daily NK’s source in North Pyongan Province, the woman was “the wife of a North Korean trader in Dandong who...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Drugs & N Korea
February 11, 2015

North Korea makes more homophobic slurs against Michael Kirby

Once again, North Korea is responding to the U.N. Commission of Inquiry’s exhaustively documented evidence of crimes against humanity … by making an issue of Chairman Kirby’s sexual orientation: The editorial also singled out the chair of the COI, Michael Kirby, and leveled homophobic abuse at the former judge, something it has done previously to discredit his work. “As far as the former chairman of the ‘Inquiry Commission’ Kirby is concerned, he is an old sexual maniac who earned an...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
February 10, 2015

Ten questions Gloria Steinem should ask the N. Koreans about women’s rights (but probably won’t dare to)

This week, I read that North Korea has granted permission for a group of women, including Gloria Steinem, and led by outspoken North Korean regime sympathizer Christine Ahn, to do a “peace march” across the DMZ. The group also intends to “hold international peace symposiums in Pyongyang and Seoul,” where Ahn will probably repeat one of her favorite falsehoods, that “crippling sanctions against the government make it difficult for ordinary people to access the basics needed for survival.” It’s a statement that could...

Categories Anju Links/Human Rights/Useful Idiocy
February 9, 2015

Dear journos: If you’re going to cover Christine Ahn’s “peace” march, do some due diligence

A few outlets have picked up on the event itself, but only one has taken note of Ahn’s role in organizing the event, and not one so far has written anything about Ahn’s extensive history as a vocal North Korean sympathizer. In fact, Ahn is a die-hard opponent of North Korea human rights legislation whose writings make frequent use of words like “imperialism,” “struggle,” and “solidarity;” who actually believes that North Korea’s famine was caused by a combination of U.S. sanctions and 21...

Categories Useful Idiocy
February 9, 2015

S. Korean Human Rights Commission: Government can’t ban leaflets

“The privately organized spread of propaganda leaflets is a form of free speech protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” the sources quoted the final statement as saying. “Restricting these scatterings is like listening to the North’s demands at the expense of South Koreans’ human rights.” [Yonhap] Yes! I’d started to wonder whether anyone in South Korea grasped this. I think we can now say that the HRC has rehabilitated...

Categories Censorship