DOUBTS IN ASIA OVER WHETHER NEW SANCTIONS AGAINST NORTH KOREA CAN WORK

[Analysts in China said Beijing’s approval of the sanctions proposed by the United States was the result of a complex calculus by Communist Party leaders. A factor that has loomed large for them in recent weeks is plans by Washington to deploy an antiballistic missile system, called Thaad, in South Korea. Chinese officials are seeking ways to prevent that from happening.]

 

By Choe Sang-Hun and Edward Wong

The Juche Tower stood out in the darkness in Pyongyang, North Korea,last year. 
Sanctions have been tightening since 2006. Credit Wong Maye-E/
Associated Press

SEOUL, South Korea — As a new set of sanctions against North Koreacirculated at the United Nations Security Council, analysts in South Korea and China expressed doubts on Friday that the measures would be tough enough to force the pariah state to give up its nuclear weapons.

The United States presented a draft resolution it had negotiated with China to the Security Council on Thursday, calling for wide-ranging penalties against North Korea for a nuclear test it conducted on Jan. 6 and for its launching of a long-range rocket a month later, both of which violated previous council resolutions.

The draft contained the most comprehensive and toughest sanctions against the isolated country that the council has ever considered. There was no doubt that they would squeeze North Korea’s ability to raise funds for its weapons programs, depending on how vigorously China, the North’s single largest trade partner, enforced the sanctions, analysts said.

If adopted, the resolution would require United Nations member states to inspect all cargo passing through their territories to or from North Korea for illicit goods. It would also attempt to limit North Korea’s sale of minerals, especially coal and iron ore, two of its most important exports.

But the draft contained no effective sanctions against a booming trade across the relatively porous 870-mile border between China and North Korea — a lifeline not only for the impoverished North Korean people but also for their government’s ability to earn cash. Nor did it require countries, especially China, to cut off oil exports to the North.

It would also not affect tens of thousands of North Korean workers at factories, construction sites and logging camps in China, Russia, Africa and the Middle East. According to some estimates, they send home $200 million to $300 million a year, most of which human rights groups contend ends up in the coffers of the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un.

“These sanctions will certainly hurt the North,” said Koh Yu-hwan, a professor at Dongguk University in Seoul. “But I don’t think they will hurt them enough to abandon their nuclear weapons.”

Analysts in China said Beijing’s approval of the sanctions proposed by the United States was the result of a complex calculus by Communist Party leaders. A factor that has loomed large for them in recent weeks is plans by Washington to deploy an antiballistic missile system, called Thaad, in South Korea. Chinese officials are seeking ways to prevent that from happening.

“If it was not for the Thaad issue, there might not be such cooperation between China and the U.S.,” said Shen Dingli, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai. “By doing this, it is still possible for China to dissuade the Americans from deploying Thaad at China’s doorstep.”

China’s agreement to limit imports of North Korean coal and iron ore, for example, came with an important caveat: It should be demonstrated that such imports would support illicit North Korean activities. North Korea’s minerals, mainly its coal and iron ore, accounted for 53 percent of its $2.8 billion in exports to China in 2014, according to data compiled by the government-run Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul.

But because of a slowing Chinese economy and sharp declines in global prices, those coal and iron ore exports have been decreasing since 2013. North Korea has already begun making up for the shortfall by exporting more workers abroad, the analyst Lee Seok said in a report published by the Korea Institute last month. The workers have therefore become an increasingly important source of cash for the North Korean government.

Nor would the proposed sanctions affect North Korea’s growing business of making clothes on contracts from Chinese companies. North Korean textile exports to China expanded to $741 million in 2014 from $186 million in 2010, and the goods are made mostly at factories run by the North Korean military or the ruling Workers’ Party, analysts and officials in Seoul said.

“There are still too many loopholes for us to predict that they will lead to North Korea’s denuclearization,” said Chang Yong-seok, an analyst at the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University. “These sanctions are more like a warning to the North about how much more it could suffer if it conducted another nuclear test, and an inducement for the country to return to the negotiating table.”

Currently, an estimated 75 percent of North Korea’s foreign trade, including almost all of its oil imports, is with China, providing Beijing with unique economic leverage over the North. The two-way trade amounted to $5.5 billion last year, according to figures from Chinese customs authorities.

But China’s approach on how to solve the North Korean problem is fundamentally different from that of the United States or South Korea. It insists that sanctions should not aim to push North Korea toward instability but to induce it back to the negotiating table.

After negotiating the proposed sanctions with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday that North Korea could ultimately have a peace agreement with the United States “if it will come to the table and negotiate the denuclearization.”

North Korea has been hit with a series of ever-tightening sanctions because of its nuclear tests and rocket launches since 2006. But the effect on one of the world’s least trade-dependent economies has been limited, especially when China has opposed crippling penalties.

The government has learned to shift the pain of international sanctions to its people by squeezing the resources available for the poor, while the elite has remained intact, defectors from the country have said.

Still, the proposed sanctions, especially mandatory inspections of all cargo, would make it harder for North Korea to raise funds and import technology for its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, analysts said. Until now, countries were required to inspect North Korean cargo only if they had reasonable grounds to believe it contained illicit items.

The proposed resolution would also ban countries from selling to the North all small arms and other conventional weapons, as well as dual-use nuclear and missile-related goods and items like trucks that could be converted for military use. It would also ban the sales of aviation and rocket fuel to hurt the North Korean military’s ability to conduct regular drills. The resolution is also expected to expand the list of luxury goods countries are banned from selling to the North.

“This could be bad because most of the parts for the nuclear facilities could only come from the outside world,” Wang Junsheng, a researcher on North Korea at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said about the mandatory inspection of cargo.

Mr. Wang said negotiations between the United States and China over the terms of the sanctions had dragged on for seven weeks because Washington had wanted Beijing to cut off more trade. That included exports of oil and imports of coal, he said.

But although China was fed up with Mr. Kim’s aggressive and unpredictable behavior, it refused to enshrine those trade limits in the sanctions because energy supplies are tied to the well-being of civilians in North Korea and China — especially important during the harsh winter, he said.

“Cutting off the trade could trigger a mass-scale humanitarian crisis,” Mr. Wang said.

Choe Sang-Hun reported from Seoul, and Edward Wong from Beijing. Yufan Huang contributed research.

@ The New York Times