Pyongyang slams new UN sanctions, whose effective application is doubted
The UN hopes to deprive North Korea of about US$ 700 million a year in export revenues. For North Korean authorities, this is another violation by the US-controlled United Nations. Pyongyang tells Trump that it is a nuclear power.
Pyongyang (AsiaNews) – North Korea has rejected new economic sanctions unanimously approved on Wednesday by the 15-member UN Security Council.
If the resolution is implement, it would deprive North Korea of about US$ 700 million in hard currency revenues. Its most significant provision is a binding cap that would cut coal exports by about 60 per cent.
The ban would also affect the export of non-ferrous metals such as copper, nickel and silver, which give Kim’s regime another US$ 100 million a year, as well as the regime’s ability to purchase new vessels and helicopters. It also restricts travel to other countries by government and military officials.
It remains to be seen whether China will implement the sanctions. Since it is North Korea’s main economic and trading partner – 90 per cent of North Korean exports go to China – it bears the greatest responsibility for making sanctions work, notes Donald Kirk, a North Korea expert.
Until now, Beijing has continued to import coal and minerals from North Korea, and to sell all of the latter’s oil and half of its food. Russia too imports coal and minerals across its border with the DPRK*.
Despite the new sanctions that would deprive North Korea of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, there is no certainty that they will be respected. This is because, Kirk says, much of the trade with China is informal, if not technically illegal.
In reacting to the Security Council’s decision, a foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement that North Korea "strongly censures and categorically rejects it as another excess of authority and violation of the DPRK's sovereignty by the UNSC acting under instructions of the US," the official KCNA news agency reported.
The statement said that September's nuclear test, its fifth and biggest, was taken to "tackle the nuclear threat and sanctions by the US".
North Korea has been under harsh UN economic sanctions for years because of its ongoing nuclear programme. The last time the United Nations imposed sanctions, described as the heaviest sanctions in 20 years, was in March.
Right after the US presidential elections, an editorial in the Rondong Sinmun, the newspaper of the North Korean Workers' Party, urged newly elected President Donald J. Trump to recognise officially the DPRK as a state with nuclear weapons.
* Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
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04/01/2008
28/02/2024 19:28
