[The tougher sanctions
impose penalties on North Korean banking, travel and trade and were passed in a
15-0 vote that reflected the country’s increased international isolation.
China, the North’s longtime benefactor, helped the United States draft the
sanctions resolution in what outside experts called a sign of Beijing’s growing
annoyance with Pyongyang’s defiant behavior on the nuclear issue. The Chinese
had entreated the North Koreans not to proceed with the Feb. 12 underground
nuclear test, their third.]
By Rick Gladstone and Choe Sang-Hun
 |
Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press
The United Nations Security Council unanimously approved new sanctions
on Thursday against North Korea.
|
The United Nations Security Council approved a new regimen of sanctions on Thursday
against North Korea for its
underground nuclear test last month in a unanimous vote that came just hours
after North Korea threatened for the first time to launch a pre-emptive nuclear
strike against the United States and South Korea.
The North Korean
leadership, which had warned the Security Council not to approve the sanctions,
said it was responding to threats already made against it, citing the
American-South Korean military exercises currently under way as evidence the
allies were preparing for “a nuclear war aimed to mount a pre-emptive strike”
on North Korea.
The tougher sanctions
impose penalties on North Korean banking, travel and trade and were passed in a
15-0 vote that reflected the country’s increased international isolation.
China, the North’s longtime benefactor, helped the United States draft the
sanctions resolution in what outside experts called a sign of Beijing’s growing
annoyance with Pyongyang’s defiant behavior on the nuclear issue. The Chinese
had entreated the North Koreans not to proceed with the Feb. 12 underground
nuclear test, their third.
Both China and the
United States presented the new constraints as adding significant pressure on
North Korea. Whether it will change North Korea’s behavior is unknown.
“The strength, breadth
and severity of these sanctions will raise the cost to North Korea of its
illicit nuclear program and further constrain its ability to finance and source
materials and technology for its ballistic missile, conventional and nuclear weapons programs,”
the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice,
told reporters after the vote.
“Taken together, these
sanctions will bite and bite hard,” she said. “They increase North Korea’s
isolation and raise the cost to North Korea’s leaders of defying the
international community. “The entire world stands united in our commitment to
the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and in our demand that North Korea
comply with its international obligations.”
Li Baodong,
the ambassador from China, which angered the North Korean government by
supporting the sanctions, told reporters that his country was “committed to
safeguarding peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula” and that the
resolution also stressed the need for resumed talks.
“This resolution is a
very important step, but one step cannot make a journey” he told reporters. “We
need a comprehensive strategy to bring the situation back to dialogue. We need
wisdom, persistence, perseverance.”
It remained unclear if
China would be willing to go beyond the scope of the sanctions, cutting off
fuel shipments and commercial trade that have in the past helped to keep the
impoverished country functioning.
The resolution, which
was drafted three weeks after the Feb. 12 underground test by North Korea, is
the Security Council’s fourth against the reclusive North Korean government. It
contains new restrictions that will block financial transactions, limit North
Korea’s reliance on bulk transfers of cash, further empower other countries to
inspect suspicious North Korean cargo, and expand a blacklist of items that the
country is prohibited from importing. The sanctions also place new constraints
on North Korean diplomats, raising their risk of expulsion from host countries.
Asked if she thought the
sanctions would break the pattern of North Korean defiance of earlier punishments
imposed by the Security Council, Ms. Rice said: “The choice lies with the
decision that the North Korean leadership makes.”
She dismissed the
North’s vows of a pre-emptive nuclear strike, saying “North Korea will achieve
nothing by continued threats and provocations.”
American experts on
North Korea said the more shrill invective was a characteristic response that
should not be taken literally, but they did not dismiss it outright.
“I don’t believe they
will carry through on these threats,” said Bill Richardson, the former New
Mexico governor and presidential candidate who has been an American emissary to
North Korea, having traveled there eight times, most recently in January.
“It does mean a longer
or sustained period of estrangement and negativity and lack of a diplomatic
dialogue,” Mr. Richardson said. “I think to show their defiance, they may take
some military steps, undefined military steps. I don’t know what they’ll do.”
In recent days, with the
resolution set to pass, North Korea characterized the sanctions as part of an
“act of war” in its escalating invective against the United States and its
allies. Earlier this week it declared the 1953 armistice that stopped the
Korean War null and void as of next Monday and threatened to turn Washington
and Seoul into “a sea in flames” with “lighter and smaller nukes.”
The combative country
has often warned that it has the right to launch pre-emptive military strikes
against the United States, claiming that the western power wants to start a war
on the Korean Peninsula. But on Thursday the North ratcheted up the hostile
language by saying those strikes could be nuclear.
“Now that the U.S. is
set to light a fuse for a nuclear war, the revolutionary armed forces of the
DPRK will exercise the right to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to destroy the
strongholds of the aggressors and to defend the supreme interests of the
country,” a spokesman of the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a
Korean-language statement carried by the North’s official Korean Central News
Agency. He used the acronym for his country’s official name, Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea.
The resolution the
United Nations adopted to impose more sanctions against the North “will compel
the DPRK to take at an earlier date more powerful second and third
countermeasures as it had declared,” the spokesman added, without elaborating.
In the past, whenever
the United Nations considered more sanctions, North Korea’s typically strident
rhetoric has grown harsher with threats of war. The threats were just that, and
analysts said the latest message was meant as much for its home population,
with the country’s young leader Kim Jong-un seeking to inspire a sense of
crisis, as it was meant to force Washington to engage it with concessions.
Photos filed by news
agencies from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, and carried in South Korean
media on Thursday showed buses covered with military camouflage and university
students rushing out of their classroom building in military uniforms in a
military exercise.
Few analysts believe
that North Korea would launch a military attack at the United States, a
decision that would be suicidal for the regime. But officials in Seoul feared
that North Korea might attempt an armed skirmish to test the military resolve
of Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s first female
president, who took office less than two weeks ago.
On Wednesday, in an
uncharacteristically blunt response to North Korea’s threat, a South Korean
Army general called a news conference and warned that if provoked, South Korea
would strike back at the top North Korean military leadership. In 2010, the two
Koreas’ front-line units exchanged artillery fire after North Korea launched a
barrage against a South Korean border island.
In the same year, 46
South Korean sailors were killed when their navy corvette sank in an explosion
the South blamed on a North Korean torpedo attack.
With the United States
standing behind it, South Korea has since vowed to strike back with a deadlier
force if North Korea provokes again.
Despite such warnings,
however, South Korean officials feared that Mr. Kim, an inexperienced leader
eager to build his credentials and gravitas as leader of his “military-first”
country might have been emboldened by his nation’s recent successful tests of a
long-range rocket and nuclear device to believe that he could try an armed
provocation with impunity.
In North Korea, where
pronouncements are carefully choreographed and timed, the threat on Tuesday to
use “lighter and smaller nukes” was read on North
Korean television by Gen. Kim Yong-chol. General Kim, the head of the North’s
military intelligence, is one of the hard-liners that South Korean officials
suspected was deeply involved in the 2010 attacks.
Rick Gladstone reported from New York, and Choe
Sang-hun from Seoul, South Korea.
