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Shady
business: N Korea and crime
By Phar Kim Beng
HONG KONG - For the second time in as many months, Australian authorities this
week linked North Korea to the trafficking of narcotics after police seized a
cache of heroin believed to have been brought ashore by a North Korean-owned
ship. Tuesday's seizure followed an incident last month in which Australian
special forces boarded a North Korean ship named Pong Su off the New South
Wales coast after a five-day chase, arresting the captain and 29 crew on
charges relating to transporting 50 kilograms of heroin into Australia.
While recent headlines about misbehavior by the Pyongyang regime have been
dominated by fears of nuclear weapons, the formal protests lodged against North
Korea by Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer over the trafficking
incidents have refocused attention on the isolated communist state's long and
shady involvement in international organized crime.
North Korea has long been suspected of maintaining links with organized crime
in Southeast Asia and Taiwan, and of attempting to build a criminal network
with the powerful Chinese Triads and Japanese Yakuza.
In US congressional testimony in 2000, Frank J Cilluffo, an expert of
transnational crime at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington, made the interesting observation that "unlike Latin America or
Europe, where organized crime attempts to penetrate the state, North Korea is
penetrating organized crime".
Although sporadic and sparse, a spate of discoveries over the past 10 years
have pointed to a North Korean criminal racket whose range of activities has
either been secretly supported by Pyongyang or tolerated with a nod and wink.
If anything, the criminal trajectory of North Korea appears to be on an upward
curve, suggesting tolerance and support at the highest level in the Stalinist
state.
In 1995, seizure by Taiwanese police of 20 ship containers loaded with
counterfeit cigarette packaging destined for North Korea proved its involvement
with a Southeast Asian crime syndicate. One of the tobacco companies whose
products were being counterfeited said the seized materials could have been
used to make cigarettes with a retail value of US$1 billion.
But by far the most serious charges thrown at North Korea to date come from its
involvement in the international drug trade.
While the verdict is still out on whether Pyongyang is directly involved in the
cultivation and production of drugs, especially opiates and heroin, the latest
discoveries in Australia seem to point to some level of complicity. In this
week's incident, Australian police said they had found 75kg of high-grade
heroin buried west of the town of Lorne in the southern state of Victoria, and
believed another batch of up to 25kg had fallen into the water during the
smuggling operation. The find took the total estimated street value of the
seized drugs to US$145 million.
Not surprisingly, the North Korean government denied all Australian charges as
propaganda to tarnish the image of the country.
Be that as it may, a long line of previous incidents tilt the scales against
North Korea. Marcus Noland, an economist at the Institute of International
Economics in Washington, has written: "North Korea has been involved in at
least 30 drug-trafficking incidents internationally, many involving diplomats.
These mainly appear to take the form of North Koreans attempting to distribute
drugs produced for export in North Korea, or North Koreans using diplomatic
immunity as an advantage in distributing drugs produced by non-Korean criminal
cartels."
Charges of North Korea's clandestine criminal operations have originated from
as early as 1970s. Since they came mostly from South Korea, the ideological foe
of North Korea, the credibility of the accusations were thought to be low,
almost unreliable. Some of the damning accounts were also supplied by North
Korean defectors sponsored by the Korean intelligence agency. Their legitimacy
was cast in further doubt, and Pyongyang could dismiss them quite easily.
It is only lately that North Koreans, mostly diplomats, have been arrested for
smuggling to evade border taxes (cigarettes, alcohol, gold), counterfeit goods
(cigarettes and compact discs), endangered species and ivory, and military
equipment that the international community has tried to piece the separate
parts together to put Kim Jong-il's regime to greater scrutiny.
In fact, arrests have been made in places as diverse as Scandinavia (Sweden,
Finland), Eastern Europe (Estonia, Russia), and Asia (China, Nepal, Thailand,
and Cambodia). There have been cases where North Korean diplomats have been
interdicted in checkpoints in Guinea, Kenya and Zambia too.
North Korea currently receives two-thirds of its foreign-currency earnings in
the form of multilateral aid, from China, Japan, the EU and the United States.
These funds cannot in principle be used to service its gaping trade deficit.
Being cash-starved, North Korea has had to resort to a range of illicit
activities to keep its economy afloat. Since Pyongyang has not disciplined its
wayward diplomats, one can only conclude that the collusion between the regime
and crime is more than just skin-deep.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
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