North Korea's burden of crime and
terror By Bertil Lintner
BANGKOK - North Korea may in the end get
its US$25 million, which has been frozen in a
Macau bank since September 2005. But the United
States and North Korea still have a long way to go
before relations between the two countries can be
normalized.
On Washington's part, there
are two issues standing in the way of diplomatic
relations: Pyongyang's alleged involvement in
criminal activities, of which the blacklisting of
Macau's Banco Delta Asia
as
an entity of "primary money laundering concern" is
only a part, and the fact that North Korea is
still on the US list of terrorism-supporting
countries.
As recently as February 16,
while the United States was trying to improve
relations with North Korea, the Congressional
Research Service (CRS) - which provides background
briefing papers for members of the US Congress -
published a 14-page report on "North Korean
Crime-for-Profit Activities".
The report
alleges that North Korea is smuggling heroin and
methamphetamines, that it produces counterfeit
currency and cigarettes, and that it also may be
engaged in insurance fraud as a matter of policy.
North Korea's involvement in large-scale,
international heroin trafficking first came to
light when, in February 1995, Russian law
enforcement officials in the far eastern port city
of Vladivostok arrested two North Korean employees
of a North Korean state logging company and seized
8 kilograms of heroin.
According to what
the North Koreans told a Russian undercover police
operative, the shipment seized was a sample that
was supposed to demonstrate the quality of 2.3
tonnes (4,840 lbs) of heroin to follow. The North
Korean assured the Russian agent that they could
supply that amount of heroin if requested.
Then, in July 2002, police in Taiwan
seized 79 kilograms of high-grade heroin and
arrested six suspects in a daring raid in the port
city of Keelung. The investigation showed that the
heroin, with a market value of $5.63 million, was
smuggled from North Korea in a fishing boat and
that a Taiwanese ship had been arranged to pick up
the drugs at sea and bring them into Taiwan.
Less than a year later, in April 2003,
Australian police intercepted a North Korean
freighter off the coast of Victoria and seized 125
kilograms of heroin. Among the 30 mostly North
Korean crew members arrested was a member of the
ruling Korean Workers' Party.
It is,
however, uncertain if the heroin actually belonged
to the North Koreans, or if they were acting as a
shipping agent for traffickers in the region. The
shipment to Australia seems to have involved shady
businessmen in Macau; according to the Australian
police, the North Korean captain of the freighter
made several frantic calls on his mobile phone to
Macau before he was apprehended.
According
to the CRS report, "Although members of the
vessel's North Korean crew were subsequently
acquitted on charges relating to the smuggling of
the drugs, experts have little doubt of a North
Korean connection to the drug shipment."
Significantly, the heroin that was seized
in Taiwan and Australia was of the Double-UO-Globe
brand, the most infamous brand produced in
laboratories controlled or protected by the United
Wa State Army, a government-recognized militia
that operates in the Myanmar sector of Southeast
Asia's Golden Triangle, one of the world's main
drug-producing areas.
Diplomatic relations
between North Korea and Myanmar were severed after
a group of North Korean agents in October 1983
detonated a bomb in the then capital Rangoon,
killing 17 visiting South Korean officials,
including four cabinet members.
However, a
clandestine military cooperation program was
re-established in 1999. In that year, Myanmar
bought about a dozen 130mm M-46 field guns from
North Korea, and since 2002 between 15 and 20
North Korean technicians have been stationed at a
naval base near Yangon, believed to be helping
Myanmar to equip some of their naval vessels with
surface-to-surface missiles. North Korean
tunneling experts have also been spotted in the
new Myanmar capital Naypyidaw. Military-ruled
Myanmar is just as cash-strapped as North Korea
and Western narcotics officials suspected a barter
deal - weapons and technology for drugs - although
that has never been proven.
But it is
obvious that Myanmar and North Korea - two
countries which are internationally condemned for
dictatorial rule and human-rights abuses - are
moving closer to each other. According to recent
reports in the Japanese press, formal diplomatic
relations between the two pariah countries are in
the process of being restored.
But North
Korea is also believed to produce its own opium.
For centuries, small quantities of opium poppies
have been grown in the mountains of northern Korea
and along the coast of the peninsula, but the
cultivation and processing of the drug became more
systematic during the Japanese colonial era.
Especially active in promoting poppy
cultivation in Korea was the Tokyo-based Taisho
Pharmaceutical Company, which bought opium from
local cultivators and turned it into morphine. But
repeated smuggling scandals involving Taisho
officials prompted the Japanese governor general
of Korea to cancel the company's concession in
1928. Hence the cultivation of opium poppies and
the production of morphine and also heroin were
placed under the jurisdiction of the
state-controlled Monopoly Bureau.
In the
1930s, Korea's production of narcotics expanded
rapidly. At the time the Monopoly was established,
Korea produced 808 kilograms of raw opium on 415
hectares of land. This increased to 5,564
kilograms on 1,054 hectares in 1931, 14,059
kilograms on 2,241 hectares in 1933, and peaked at
50,725 kilograms on 8,464 hectares in 1941.
However, very little of the opium produced in
Korea actually remained there. Over 90% of the
Japanese colony's output was exported to Manchuria
and China, earning substantial revenues for the
Japanese authorities.
Opium production
probably never ceased in northern Korea, and
current estimates by US sources put the area under
poppy cultivation at 4,000 hectares in the early
1990s and 7,000 hectares for 1995. Current
production is believed to be below these figures
because of heavy rains in the mid-1990s which
affected all crops, including poppies, but no one
knows for certain as there are no reliable
satellite images showing the poppy fields and no
ground surveys have been made by independent
researchers. The recent CRS report suggests the
area under opium cultivation may be at least
3,000-4,000 hectares.
The CRS report also
states that North Korea's "maximum methamphetamine
production capacity is estimated to be 10-15 tons
of the highest-quality product for export". Other
sources allege that the North Koreans also buy
methamphetamines from private dealers in China,
and re-export the drugs to third countries.
But the main destination for drugs smuggled
through and from North Korea is without doubt
Japan, which does not have a huge population of
heroin users, but where the abuse of amphetamines
and methamphetamines has been widespread since the
end of World War II. The country has an estimated
600,000 amphetamine and methamphetamine addicts
and 2.18 million casual users.
North
Korea's drugs are all meant for export, as drug
use is not common there. In March 2002, Kim
Jong-il even announced that users would be
executed: "I will subject all those who sell or
use illegal drugs to a firing squad, and have
ordered that Chinese drug traders be beaten with
sticks."
In October 2003, the official
Korean Central News Agency reported that a
Japanese national, Yoshiaka Sawada, had been
arrested trying to bribe a North Korean into
buying drugs from "a third country" - obviously
China - and smuggling them into Japan on board the
North Korean ship Mangyongbong-92, which used to
sail regularly between Wonsan in North Korea and
the Japanese port of Niigata until it was banned
from entry into Japan in July 2006 after North
Korea test-fired a Taepodong-2 missile.
The North Koreans would have been blamed
for bringing in that shipment. Clearly, Pyongyang
wanted to make it known that it was firm on the
issue of drugs and that any traffickers were
actually Chinese or Japanese.
Between 1999
and 2001, Japanese authorities seized 1,113
kilograms of amphetamine-type substances smuggled
in from North Korea and sold to Japanese criminal
gangs. This made up 34% of Japan's total seizures
of the drug. China, the main source, accounted for
38%. Since then, it is less clear what has
happened to North Korean methamphetamines.
The 2006 US International Narcotics
Strategy Control Report says, "There were no
seizures of methamphetamines in Japan during 2005
linked to North Korea ... It is possible that
methamphetamine manufactured in the DPRK
[Democratic People's Republic of Korea - North
Korea] is now identified as Chinese-source,
because of the involvement of ethnic Chinese
criminal elements working with the DPRK abroad, as
well as within China, in the narcotics
production/trafficking business."
North
Korea's links with Chinese-organized crime
networks outside Asia were discovered during two
US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
operations code-named "Smoking Dragon" and "Royal
Charm", which were launched in August 2005.
Fifty-nine members of a Chinese organized
crime gang were arrested in Atlantic City, Los
Angeles, Lag Vegas, Chicago and Philadelphia and
the FBI and related law enforcement agencies
seized 36,000 ecstasy pills, half a kilogram of
crystal methamphetamines, counterfeit cigarettes
and pharmaceuticals - and $4.5 million in fake
"supernotes", bogus US currency of exceptional
quality, which the US authorities asserted
originated in North Korea, as did the cigarettes.
The organized criminals were also charged
with arms trafficking and, according to a US
government statement at the time, "conspiring to
import more than a million dollars' worth of
silenced pistols, sub-machine guns, assault rifles
and other weapons, including rocket launchers".
One of the accusations leveled by US authorities
against Banco Delta Asia was that it had "accepted
large deposits of cash, including counterfeit US
currency" from North Korean officials in the
former Portuguese enclave.
North Korea has
also been linked to a breakaway faction of the
Irish Republican Army, known as the "Official
IRA". In October 2005 - barely two months after
operations Smoking Dragon and Royal Charm - US
authorities sought the extradition from Ireland of
Sean Garland for allegedly trafficking forged
dollars together with a network of Russian former
KGB agents.
The latter reportedly
collected the fake bills from the North Korean
Embassy in Moscow, which were then transferred to
what was described as a "popular holiday
destination in Eastern Europe" - which could have
been in Romania, Bulgaria or Cyprus - where they
were picked up by "mostly married couples and
pensioners" so as to avoid suspicion.
The
bills were then taken to Ireland. Garland, who was
71 at the time and headed the Official IRA as well
as the leftist Workers' Party of Ireland,
described the accusations as "gross slander and
lies, anti-communist propaganda and part of a
right-wing attack on the integrity" of his party.
He was briefly arrested by the authorities in
Northern Ireland, but later released on bail. In
Moscow, however, an Armenian former KGB officer
was sentenced to nine years in prison for
involvement in the fake-dollar scheme.
North Korea's relations with the IRA date
to the 1970s, when it was Pyongyang's policy to
support revolutionary movements around the world,
but then its links were with the more militant
faction of the Irish republican movement, the
Provisional IRA (PIRA).
According to
American North Korea specialist Joseph Bermudez:
"Beginning in the early 1970s and through the
1980s, North Korea has maintained low-level
contacts with the PIRA and its political wing,
Sinn Fein. These relations are believed to have
been coordinated at various times in Libya,
Nicaragua and by the Palestinian Liberation
Organization, and to have included the supply of
weapons and training in guerrilla warfare,
intelligence and explosives. A very small number
of PIRA members are also believed to have received
training within North Korea."
In recent
years, however, there have actually been no signs
of North Korean support for international
terrorism. North Korea's inclusion in the list of
states sponsoring terrorism is largely due to its
providing sanctuary to some members of the
Japanese-communist Red Army Faction who hijacked a
Japanese airliner to Pyongyang in 1970; the
abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and
1980s and the 1983 Yangon bombing, as well as the
bombing of a South Korean airliner in November
1987 which killed 115 people when it exploded near
the southeastern coast of Myanmar. According to
the US State Department, "North Korea is not
conclusively linked to any terrorist acts since
1987."
The removal of North Korea from the
terrorism list was called for under the February
13 six-nation agreement, when North and South
Korea, China, Russia, Japan and the United States
thought they had found a solution to the nuclear
crisis on the Korean peninsula. But North Korea
failed to meet the April 14 deadline to shut down
its nuclear reactor in Yongbyon in return for aid
and other concessions precisely because it was not
certain that the money in Banco Delta Asia had
been released.
The outcome has been a
stalemate - and any move to delete North Korea
from the US list of terrorism-supporting countries
would in any case be met with strong opposition
from Japan, which wants North Korea to account for
the Japanese citizens it abducted several decades
ago.
So after the optimism of February 13,
the situation is almost back to square one. North
Korea, naturally, denies any involvement in
counterfeiting and drug smuggling and has given
inadequate and conflicting accounts about the fate
of the Japanese it abducted. The US and Japan
think otherwise, and it is therefore doubtful that
the six-nation talks will even ease the tension
between North Korea on the one hand and Japan and
the US on the other.
In a strongly worded
message on April 5, the Korean Central News Agency
even blasted the "imperialists" for their "carrot
approach": "They are intensifying economic
domination and subjugation of other countries by
such levers as 'aid', 'cooperation' and 'loans'
... there will be disastrous consequences for
those countries which abandon their revolutionary
principle and meet the imperialists' demands."
Evidently, despite some thaw, we won't see US or
Japanese embassies in Pyongyang any time soon.
Bertil Lintner is a former
correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review
and is currently a writer with Asia-Pacific Media
Services.
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