North Korea’s Still in the Coal Trade and Fingers Point to China
North Korea’s Still in the Coal Trade and Fingers Point to China
(Bloomberg) -- North Korea stepped up its exports of illegal coal shipments in 2019, with most of those deliveries headed for China, according to a confidential United Nations report.
While a coal ban imposed by the UN is intended to deprive the North Korean regime of the cash it needs to develop nuclear weapons, Pyongyang raked in $370 million in shipments from January through August alone, a panel monitoring the enforcement of sanctions on North Korea said in a report to the Security Council, citing evidence provided by an unidentified member state.
Most of those sales were made via ship-to-ship transfers from North Korean-flagged vessels to “Chinese local barges,” the report, which was seen by Bloomberg, cited the member as saying.
Sanctions enforcement is a crucial aspect of President Donald Trump’s effort to get the government of Kim Jong Un to eliminate its nuclear program by choking off the hard cash that keeps North Korea’s meager economy functioning.
China, which together with Russia has been calling on the UN to the ease sanctions, has been accused of looking the other way on sanctions evasion out of fear that a collapse of the Kim government could trigger a humanitarian crisis that would spread over its border.
“China has always faithfully and seriously fulfilled its international obligations and sustained huge losses and tremendous pressure in the process,” the Chinese mission to the UN said in an emailed statement on Monday. “China will continue to work towards dialogue and detente, advance political settlement process, and play a positive and constructive role on working towards denuclearization of the Peninsula.”
New Weapon
Kim last month declared he was no longer bound by his pledge to halt major missile tests and would soon debut a “new strategic weapon,” adding to Trump’s foreign policy concerns in an election year.
The North Korean leader told a gathering of party officials in Pyongyang that U.S. actions left him no choice but to reconsider commitments that underpinned three unprecedented meetings with Trump over the past 18 months.
With UN sanctions in place, North Korean coal exports initially dropped as nations including China and Russia kept the country’s ships away from their ports. But experts say that loopholes, like the ship-to-ship transfers have been found.
The panel wrote that it’s investigating cases of North Korean nationals earning income overseas, including athletes, physicians, information technology workers, and manual laborers. North Korea has long relied on cadres of workers in foreign countries. A deadline for UN members to repatriate those workers expired in December.
To contact the reporter on this story: David Wainer in New York at dwainer3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, John Harney, Karen Leigh
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