Search Results for “luxury”

August 16, 2016

The Obama administration isn’t following Kim Jong-un’s money. Congress should ask why.

In February and March, respectively, the U.S. Congress and the U.N. Security Council responded to North Korea’s fourth nuclear test with sanctions that were, in theory, an order of magnitude stronger than any sanctions imposed on North Korea until then. Sanctions, of course, are only as good as their enforcement, and in enforcing sanctions against North Korea, the most important rule has always been “follow the money.” Money — along with the contradictions of its political system — has always...

Sanctions/U.S. Law

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...

Africa/Arms Trafficking/Sanctions

August 10, 2016

Are Kim Jong-un’s apologists in U.N. aid agencies doing North Koreans more harm than good?

With a government in control, it is impossible to reach those who are powerless without paying the powerful, and paying the President and the government will make them less interested in listening to their people. Instead of having to raise money through taxation and deliver services in return, they can instead use their people to extract money from donors. They can enrich themselves by keeping their population poor; such aid is an instrument of inequality. – Nobel Prize winning economist...

Famine & Food Aid

August 2, 2016

Why Treasury should require banks to keep records about N. Korean beneficial ownership

In my policy discussions about North Korea, two of the smartest sanctions skeptics I’ve debated are professors John Park and James Walsh. Not only are they both genuinely nice people, their skepticism points to flaws and gaps in the sanctions regime, and that skepticism ultimately serves to improve the quality of the sanctions and their enforcement. They’ve been particularly persuasive about the importance of pursuing “North Korea Inc.,” Pyongyang’s extensive and shadowy network of agents and trading companies in China,...

"United" Nations/Europe/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law

July 22, 2016

Air Koryo plane that made emergency landing was one of its newer aircraft

An Air Koryo flight has had to make an emergency landing in Shenyang after the cabin filled with smoke. The plane, belonging to the North’s national carrier, was flying to Beijing from Pyongyang when it made a forced landing because of the smoke, the airport said in a short statement on its microblog. The aircraft made a safe emergency landing, and “nothing abnormal” was found in its condition, although an investigation was underway, it added. Xinhua, which had initially reported...

Miscellaneous

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...

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...

Sanctions

July 8, 2016

A blanket trade embargo won’t help us disarm or reform North Korea

In Wednesday’s post, I wrote about Beyond Parallel’s imagery analysis pointing to a decline in cross-border trade between China and North Korea, along with the limitations of that analysis and its great potential if expanded and focused. But I also alluded to a broader policy concern about the error of equating trade volume with sanctions enforcement: that while China’s under-enforcement of sanctions has historically been the greatest impediment to our North Korea policy, sanctions over-enforcement is an equal danger. Recently, I’ve heard...

Border Control/Capitalism/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions

July 6, 2016

The evidence of China’s compliance with North Korea sanctions is still mixed.

This week, there has been much talk and excitement about a new study, by the new blog Beyond Parallel, analyzing satellite imagery of six select sites along the Chinese-North Korean border, and finding evidence of a recent decline in bilateral trade. From this, the study concludes that China may be (as Josh Rogin paraphrases it for The Washington Post) “Beijing has been quietly punishing Kim by cutting off the flow of funds to his regime.” Here are the study’s two main...

China & Korea/Sanctions

June 28, 2016

N. Korean counterfeiting surges as Bureau 39’s checks bounce.

When the Secret Service first found high-quality counterfeit dollars circulating in the Middle East over three decades ago, North Korea wasn’t the prime suspect; . The counterfeits were so good that experts could only tell them from the originals by the superior quality of their printing, so the Secret Service named them “supernotes.” The Secret Service’s suspicions shifted to North Korea in 2000, after Cambodian authorities arrested Yoshimi Tanaka, a Japanese Red Army hijacker who had taken refuge in North...

Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions

June 22, 2016

North Korean trading companies can’t pay their Chinese creditors because of sanctions.

Lately, the news about the implementation and impact of sanctions has come in so thick and fast that I’ve been unable to follow it all, and have instead bookmarked it until I can identify patterns and put it into context. A report I saw yesterday, however, demands immediate attention. According to the Daily NK, starting in April, the trading companies the North Korean regime sends to China to earn hard currency began defaulting on payments to their Chinese creditors because...

Sanctions

June 21, 2016

U.N. aid isn’t solving North Korea’s hunger problem

Two years ago, a U.N. Commission of Inquiry cited estimates that North Korea’s Great Famine of 1993 to 1999 killed up to 2 million people.* All of those deaths were needless — the regime spent those years wasting more than enough money to feed everyone who starved. By 1995, when Kim Jong-il finally let U.N. aid agencies in, hundreds of thousands (or more) had already died. The aid agencies, most prominently the World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture...

Famine & Food Aid

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...

Cyberwar

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...

"United" Nations/Money Laundering/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...

Korean Politics/Korean Society/Propaganda/Reconstruction/Subversion

April 1, 2016

European Union publishes new N. Korea sanctions regulation to implement UNSCR 2270

I’ve previously written about the importance of Europe’s role in enforcing U.N. sanctions against North Korea. On March 5th, the EU designated 16 people and 12 entities under its existing North Korea sanctions program. Yesterday, it finally announced the publication of a new “restrictive measures” regulation to implement UNSCR 2270. Based on the summary, the new regulation follows last month’s Security Council resolution right down the line. The measures extend, inter alia, export and import prohibitions to any item (except food or medicine)...

"United" Nations/Europe/Sanctions

March 23, 2016

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...

Diplomacy/Money Laundering/NK Crime/Sanctions

March 15, 2016

So far, sanctions are cutting off Pyongyang’s cash while sparing North Korea’s poor.

A month after the President signed the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act and two weeks after the U.N. Security Council approved Resolution 2270, enough information has emerged from North Korea to allow for a preliminary assessment of how the sanctions are affecting those they are meant to target, and those they are meant to spare. Sanctions have begun to hit their intended targets. The Daily NK reports that the donju, the well-connected traders who help finance Pyongyang’s priorities through trade with...

Border Control/Capitalism/Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions

Search Results for: luxury