New York—North Korea has pressed ahead with its nuclear and missile programs and continues to evade United Nations sanctions through increased illegal ship-to-ship transfers of oil products at sea, a UN report said Friday.
In a 62-page report sent to the Security Council, the UN panel of experts also listed violations of a ban on North Korean exports of coal, iron, seafood and other products that generate millions of dollars in revenue for Kim Jong Un’s regime.
Pyongyang “has not stopped its nuclear and missile programs and continued to defy Security Council resolutions through a massive increase in illicit ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum products, as well as through transfers of coal at sea during 2018,” said the report, seen by AFP.
The transfer of petroleum products to North Korean tankers at sea remains “a primary method of sanctions evasion” involving 40 vessels and 130 associated companies, it added.
The violations have rendered the latest batch of sanctions “ineffective” by flouting the cap on oil, fuel and coal imposed in a raft of UN resolutions adopted last year, it added.
Meanwhile, in Singapore, North Korea’s foreign minister Saturday criticized the US for urging that sanctions be maintained against Pyongyang, after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked the international community to keep up pressure against the reclusive regime.
Despite “goodwill measures” taken by the North, Washington was “raising its voice louder for maintaining the sanctions against the DPRK,” the North’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho told a security forum in Singapore, according to a statement. DPRK are the initials of the North’s official name.
He criticized “insistent moves manifested within the US to go back to the old, far from its leader’s intention”.
“Impatience is not helpful at all for building confidence. Especially, advancing unilateral demands will further deepen mistrust, instead of reviving trust,” said the statement.
“As long as the US does not show in practice its strong will to remove our concerns, there will be no case whereby we will move forward first unilaterally,” Ri added.
At a historic June summit with US President Donald Trump, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed up to a vague commitment of “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” in the hope of getting UN and US sanctions relief.
Trump, however, has repeatedly warned Pyongyang that the sanctions must remain in place and could even be tightened as long as there is no progress on ending its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
North Korea also “attempted to supply small arms and light weapons (SALW) and other military equipment via foreign intermediaries” to Libya, Yemen, and Sudan, said the report.
It named Syrian arms trafficker Hussein Al-Ali who offered “a range of conventional arms, and in some cases ballistic missiles to armed groups in Yemen and Libya” that were produced in North Korea.
With Ali acting as a go-between, a “protocol of cooperation” between Yemen’s Huthi rebels and North Korea was negotiated in 2016 in Damascus that provided for a “vast array of military equipment.”
The panel continues to investigate such military cooperation that would be in violation of an arms embargo on North Korea.
North Korea continued to receive revenue from exports of banned commodities, for instance, deliveries of iron and steel to China, India and other countries that generated nearly $14 million from October to March.
“Financial sanctions remain some of the most poorly implemented and actively evaded measures of the sanctions regime,” said the panel.
North Korean diplomats play a key role in sanctions evasion by setting up multiple bank accounts, it added.
Despite a ban on joint ventures with North Korea, the panel has uncovered more than 200 such jointly-run firms, many of which are involved in construction and other businesses in Russia.
The panel is tasked by the council with monitoring the implementation of the raft of sanctions imposed in response to North Korea’s sixth nuclear test and ballistic missile tests.
The United States last month asked a UN sanctions committee to order a halt to all deliveries of oil products to North Korea after reporting that Pyongyang had exceeded the cap through the illegal ship supplies.
Russia and China, however, put a six-month hold on that request.
The report cited US figures estimating that North Korea had procured over 500,000 barrels of petroleum products in the first five months of 2018.
Earlier, Pompeo urged major powers attending the same forum, including China and Russia, to keep up sanctions pressure against the North.
At landmark talks in June with US President Donald Trump, the North’s leader Kim Jong Un signed up to a vague commitment to “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” — a far cry from long-standing US demands for complete, verifiable and irreversible disarmament.
US officials have publicly been optimistic about the agreement, but progress appears to have been slow.