What is suspected, many experts, a UN report now official: North Korea takes advantage of various loopholes to circumvent the sanctions. How efficient is the economic pressure really is?
It is a frustrating conclusion, the report published on Tuesday by the United Nations: A UN panel of experts has systematically examined the implementation of security Council economic sanctions against North Korea. The verdict: The sanctions route “ineffective”.
With the help of satellite images, the experts have various ways by which the Regime can outsmart the repression: As of Öltransfers it always comes back to the home on the open sea, transferring the raw materials from ship to ship. In addition, North Korea has installed its largest port in Nampo, a sub-water Pipeline, it can seemingly unload unnoticed – oil Supplies. The panel of experts of the United Nations expects Pyongyang to exceed to its limits of 500,000 tonnes of oil Import by far.
Kim Jong-Un on 26.02.2019 in Vietnam to visit
US is considering further sanctions
Since the failure of the second summit meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump, and North Korea’s commander-in-chief Kim Jong-Un is threatening the negotiations for the so-called De-nuclear of the Korean Peninsula to tilt again. US national security adviser, John Bolton, has already spoken out to show the Regime in Pyongyang, with a further round of sanctions. Kim Jong-Un is this regurgitation of bitter, because the recent negotiations have shown, this is his priority in the negotiations is clearly on an easing of sanctions. A peace Declaration or other measures were last updated in the Background.
However, the recent UN report raises a crucial question: to what Extent have been taken by the sanctions the North Korean economy? “You can say with certainty that the sanctions will impose on both the Regime as well as – unfortunately – the General population is a significant expense,” says Mason Richey, Professor of international politics at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul: “at the same time the sanctions are currently not sufficient enough to support the Kim Regime to serious, to move immediate steps to nuclear disarmament”. It slip to be on the one hand, holes are, as she describes the recent UN experts report, co-responsible, but also the lax observance of the sanctions by China, by far the largest trading partner of North Korea.
The second Meeting between Kim and Trump in February has failed
North Korea released hardly eigene statistics
One of the empirically verifiable effects of the sanctions could be the looming food shortages, According to another UN report, North Korea has retracted the worst harvest for over ten years. Blame, among other things, the Floods, and heat waves from the last year. However, not likely to have the same currency, well, the lack of Foreign countries, without which the country comes to the needed fertilizer imports, also contributed.
To measure the North Korean economy is very difficult. Until the beginning of the 60s, North Korea has issued a statistical Yearbook. Since then, economic data from the country have become increasingly rare, and increasingly unreliable. During the famine in the 90s, the Regime had published statistics to international organizations in exchange for aid deliveries.
Problematic is also, that socialist regimes always tend to capture increases in the price officially, which also leads to a fake economic forecasts. The Korean Central Bank estimated that the economy of North Korea has shrunk in the year 2017 by 3.5 percent. At the same time she admitted that a serious forecast would always be more difficult – not least because more and more black markets in the country. The Bank increasingly relies on intelligence information, satellite imagery, and pure speculation.
Futuristic Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang
Construction Boom despite sanctions
Individual observations seem to show that the country is developing economically relatively well: In the capital, Pyongyang, a construction Boom transformed the city’s Skyline to that of a typical Asian metropolis. At the same time, the Won-Dollar exchange rate on the black markets seem to be relatively stable, as well as gasoline prices.
This Argument is North Korea expert Go Myong-Hyun, the South Korean think tank Asan Institute based in Seoul, however, do not apply: “North Korea has de facto legalized the use of foreign currency and the country to a basket of the Yuan, US Dollars and Euros.” Researchers Go draws a comparison to the Euro-crisis: at that Time, the wages in Eastern and southern Europe had fallen, but at the same time, price inflation remained constant. “The same is happening in North Korea,” he says. “Of course, there are still loopholes that the efficiency of the sanctions is undermined. But they are much too small, the negative effect of the sanctions to compensate for,” says the South Koreans.
Economic zone of Kaesong, the Korean-Korean border
Pressure and approach
The fact alone, that the UN released report on North Korea’s circumvention of sanctions, it is important to note: last year, the same panel has written a report, but not published. Probably because China and Russia have agreed to as members of the security Council of the publication. However, after the Hanoi summit has brought, contrary to expectations, no success, seem to be also China and Russia to want to the public pressure to increase.
Meanwhile, South Korea is trying in talks to persuade the US, inter-Korean economic projects such as the Kaesong special economic zone. To Go says Myong Hyun, the Asan Institute: “President Moon is afraid that North Korea – not the USA – could withdraw from the dialogue. Projects such as the inter-Korean special economic zone to set for Pyongyang incentives, in the course of inter-Korean rapprochement.”