Mick Hartley

The North Korean arms export business:

The latest in a series of UN Security Council sanctions violations by North Korea was revealed yesterday; the transportation of tank parts to Congo-Brazzaville last November.

This is the fourth of four cases of sanctions violations which the head of the organization in charge of overseeing UN sanctions compliance, Turkish ambassador Ertugrul Apakan, recently reported to the Security Council.

According to reports, CMA-CGM, a French company which was shipping cargo from a port in Malaysia to destinations in Africa, reported its suspicions related to the cargo, whereupon the vessel was intercepted by South African forces and found to contain parts for Soviet-designed T-54 and T-55 tanks, not bulldozers as the attendant documentation claimed.

The South Africans then sent a letter reporting the violation of UN Resolution 1874 to the sanctions committee.

Notably, the cargo had already been trans-shipped in China, and it is unclear why suspicions were not aroused there.

China? Unclear indeed. And then there's this:

North Korea smuggled about 3,400 tons of weapons into the Democratic Republic of Congo in the midst of a civil war there in January, with some of them going to Congolese insurgents or nearby countries, VOA quoted a UN official as saying Wednesday.

Christian Dietrich, a member of the UN Security Council committee investigating Congo, told VOA that the North Korean ship Birobong arrived in the port of Boma, Congo on Jan. 21, where it unloaded some 3,400 tons of weapons, 100 times the amount seized in Thailand earlier this month.

Dietrich said the committee was told the weapons were "modern" but was unable to find out any details. Assuming all the weapons were AK rifles, the weight would be equivalent to about 800,000 of them, he added….

Dietrich said there are indications that North Korea was the source of state-of-the-art weapons carried by insurgents in eastern Congo. In some cases, Congolese government soldiers have sold their arms to neighboring countries such as Zimbabwe, he said.

800,000 AK rifles – to a war zone where over 5 million may already have died?

Well, if it's any comfort, at least the Dear Leader may soon be facing the final curtain.