|
북한에 대한 경제 제재는 북한 민중 특히 여성과 노약자를 대상으로 한 반 인권적 범죄행위
Cutting Off the Lifelines of North Koreans? That’s Called a Siege, Not “Sanctions”
by JOSEPH ESSERTIER
January 09 2020
Last winter, Patrick Cockburn called attention to one of the more disturbing effects of the sanctions against North Korea—their “ghost ships” (in “It’s Time We Saw Economic Sanctions for What They Really Are—War Crimes” . Over the past several years, fishing vessels have been washing up on the western shores of Northeastern Japan in larger and larger numbers. Like a ghost ship from the film the “Pirates of the Caribbean,” some have “skeletonized” remains on board. On others, Japanese find survivors who are desperate for help. A gruesome case of heads found severed from their bodies was discovered the other day.
The problem seems to be getting worse:
2013—80 boats
2017—104 boats
2018—225 boats
2019—at least 156 boats
For what purpose do these men gamble on small, unseaworthy boats, out on the open sea, in an expanse of 600 miles between North Korea and Japan? “Dead men tell no tales”? From the perspective of one Japanese fisherman who witnessed such North Koreans fishing from close up, “taking such a boat out to sea is suicide”. The mass media just keep telling us the fairy tale, that it is all the fault of one man, the Wicked Dictator of the North. But still, a pattern can be detected, month after month, year after year, in which more North Korean nuclear and missile tests lead to more “tightening” of international sanctions, which leads to more “pressure to boost agriculture and food supplies”, which leads to more fishermen from North Korea venturing farther out in fragile boats.
None of the sanctions were supposed to increase the severity of food shortages in North Korea, but by now we have years of anecdotal evidence such as “Sanctions Are Hurting Aid Efforts and Ordinary People in North Korea” and piles of U.N. and human rights organization-type reports, that demonstrate that some of the sanctions are doing just that. The governments of the United States and other rich and powerful countries are causing a humanitarian catastrophe in North Korea, just as they have done in Iraq. And we, the citizens of those countries, are paying them to do it.
Ineffective Sanctions
It goes without saying that some sanctions are good and some are bad. For example, sanctions that kill one million people in Iraq are bad, while sanctions that narrowly target criminals who have committed the “supreme international crime” such as George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and that do not hurt anyone else, would be good.
In the case of the sanctions against North Korea, one must consider the original goals. Sending more ghost ships to Japan’s shores was not the stated intention of any of the sanctions. They were supposed to achieve goals such as 1) toppling the heads of state of North Korea, 2) punishing the government of North Korea for launching missiles, and 3) promoting peace and human rights.
There is no need to waste time pondering whether the first goal has been achieved, as, for better or worse, three-quarters of a century have demonstrated the survivability of the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Even one of the most irresponsible and conspicuous defenders of that claim, David Sanger of the New York Times, admitted as much: “I took a long, 10-day train trip through North Korea in 1992, or so, and wrote a New York Times magazine piece whose basic thesis was this country would be gone in a few years. Well, you can see how wrong I was.”
Yes. And looking back on the three-quarters of a century of U.S. military violence around the world, it would be surprising if all the Washington-led sanctions were actually achieving the third goal. Setting aside that one for now, however, let us consider the second goal. There is hard evidence that it has not been achieved, even if it appears in the mass media that it has. The effects of sanctions in North Korea can actually be seen just by looking at the nighttime lights of North Korea, according to a serious study of its economy by the Stanford economist Yong Suk Lee (“International Isolation and Regional Inequality: Evidence from Sanctions on North Korea,” 2017). He writes, “Pyongyang as the hometown of the dictator, as well as communist party members, bureaucrats, military and cooperative leaders, represents the North Korean elites. Though sanctions often aim to punish the target country’s elites, the results [of this research] indicate that the populace in the marginalized regions may be the ones who suffer more.”
Most of the country is dark at night due to the lack of lights, even with the urban beautification campaign that their head of state Kim Jong-un has implemented. “The dark area between brightly lit South Korea and China is North Korea. Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, is lit as if an island in the ocean.” Lee studied U.S. military satellite data and found that the “difference in nighttime lights between the capital Pyongyang and the rest of the country increases by 1.9% with an additional sanctions event.” In other words, diachronic changes in nighttime luminosity demonstrate that sanctions are stimulating the economy of Pyongyang, in fact, and concentrating even more wealth and power in the hands of government elites.
Inhumane Sanctions
“Trump’s push for ‘maximum pressure’ resulted in a global and almost total ban on North Korea-related trade, investment, or financial transactions. This effectively put the whole country under siege, with all the consequences this implies for the innocents within.” These are the words of Henri Feron, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and one of the authors of a new study entitled “The Human Costs and Gendered Impact of Sanctions on North Korea”. See the video here.
Yong Suk Lee would probably concur, at least about the “already marginalized hinterlands.” He finds that the gap in wealth between places like that and Pyongyang is getting worse. And even without any special study, it seems obvious that women are hurt when exports of textiles are banned, since textiles is an industry in which the overwhelming majority of workers are women. Resolution 2375 of September 2017 targeted textiles.
Perhaps there are certain sanctions that hurt the autocrats of North Korea without hurting the people, but looking at the overall situation, neither the scholar Feron nor the journalist Cockburn mince their words. They both call the sanctions a “siege.” Such is their cumulative effect. Cockburn goes further and posits that when the sanctions amount to “collective punishment of millions of innocent civilians who die, sicken or are reduced to living off scraps from the garbage dumps,” the siege constitutes a “war crime.” Another sense in which a siege can constitute a war crime is when they are used to start wars, e.g., how sanctions were used to provoke the Empire of Japan to strike Us first. One could draw many parallels between North Korea today and the Empire of Japan in 1941.
The study “The Human Costs” breaks the news to us ever so gently, but even in that cautious document, one finds evidence of a siege: “There is increasing evidence that the sanctions regime on the DPRK is having adverse humanitarian consequences, even as the relevant UN resolutions explicitly state this is not the intention. The UN Panel of Experts has determined that the ‘[UN] sectoral sanctions are affecting the delivery of humanitarian-sensitive items’ and that their implementation has ‘had an impact on the activities of international humanitarian agencies working to address chronic humanitarian needs in the country.’”
“Has had an impact” = “has made it extremely difficult to help” North Koreans. A similar message about the obstacles that humanitarian organizations must overcome are evidenced, too, in the film about the Eugene Bell Foundation “Out of Breath”. They have had some success, in spite of many setbacks caused by sanctions, to help North Koreans deal with stubborn strains of TB.
The items prohibited under Resolution 2397 (December 2017) include “irrigation equipment and prefabricated greenhouses; medical appliances, such as ultrasound machines and orthopaedic appliances for persons with disabilities; and any item with a metallic component, including ‘screws, bolts, nails, staples’ that are ‘often components of humanitarian-sensitive goods.’” Do these things sound like parts that are essential for nukes or other WMD—materials or technology that North Korea does not already have?
This year the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) estimate that “10 million people are food insecure and in need of urgent food assistance.”
Conclusion: We Eat and Drink While Tomorrow They Die
Cockburn wrote, “Economic sanctions are like a medieval siege but with a modern PR apparatus attached to justify what is being done. A difference is that such sieges used to be directed at starving out a single town or city while now they are aimed at squeezing whole countries into submission.” Indeed. Again, one only needs look at the documented effects of sanctions on Iraq to see their poor track record. Cockburn and Henri Feron use the word “siege” to convey the fact that the overall impact of sanctions on North Korea is to starve and, during the bitter winter of the Korean Peninsula, freeze vulnerable sectors of the population to death. There may be a good argument for certain types of sanctions, such as those that would block the sale of critical parts of weapons in a nuclear weapons program—which would not apply to Iran since, unlike North Korea, they do not have such a program —but there are no good arguments for prohibiting the sale of “humanitarian-sensitive items,” such as syringes; agricultural machinery including tractors and pumping equipment; and fuel. Cutting off these lifelines of the vulnerable will only hurt them, not the elites. For example, “The Human Costs” mentions that “shortages of fuel, electricity and pumping equipment limit the ability to irrigate, reducing yields and making crops susceptible to extreme weather shocks, such as droughts and heatwaves.”
Anyone can see that North Koreans need help. Instead of demanding that their government strip down naked, as Trump did in Hanoi, we could demand of the U.N. that they discontinue Resolutions 2375 and 2397 (for starters), and of the U.S. that they follow through with Trump’s promise and actually provide North Korea with a security guarantee.
Compared to the U.S., North Korea is a small, poor country with a micro military budget. The notion that they might strike the U.S. first is absurd. The demand at Hanoi—the sentence that begins by saying they must fully dismantle their “nuclear infrastructure, chemical and biological warfare program…”—was ridiculous. The U.S. has so much to gain and so little to lose by giving North Korea what it wants, and what the people need.
The sanctions against North Korea are firmly in place. True. But this is not because everyone loves Washington and wants to cooperate with them. They are firmly in place because U.S.-based multinational corporations control about half of all the world’s wealth. Governments and businesses around the world cooperate with Washington because they have to. Most of the population of North Korea are unfairly besieged and harassed by the Washington-coerced “international community.” As one can see from the assassination of Iraq’s Qassim Soleimani, the Bully is completely out of control. We citizens have the power and the responsibility to force those in power to seek a reasonable and humane solution to a crisis of their own making. Burying our heads in the sand will leave the blood of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children on our hands.
Many thanks to Stephen Brivati for comments, suggestions, and editing.
Join the debate on Facebook
More articles by:JOSEPH ESSERTIER
Joseph Essertier is an associate professor at the Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/09/cutting-off-the-lifelines-of-north-koreans-thats-called-a-siege-not-sanctions/u
First Comprehensive Assessment of the Impact of Sanctions Against North Korea Shows Adverse Consequences for Civilians, Especially Women

Posted on October 30, 2019
Download a copy of The Human Costs and Gendered Impact of Sanctions on North Korea.Download
NEW YORK—As talks between the United States and North Korea remain at an impasse, a new report shows that sanctions imposed on North Korea are having adverse consequences on humanitarian aid and economic development in the country, with a disproportionate impact on women.
The Human Costs and Gendered Impact of Sanctions on North Korea (PDF), which was produced by an international and multidisciplinary panel of independent experts, is the first comprehensive assessment of the human impact of sanctions against North Korea. Drawing on often neglected information from UN agencies on the ground as well as the authors’ combined expertise in public health, law, economics, history, and gender studies, the report also shows that existing UN mechanisms to exempt humanitarian-related items are insufficient to prevent these negative impacts, and, in fact, delays and funding shortfalls may have resulted in the deaths of thousands of people.
“As one of the few American physicians who has worked to deliver humanitarian aid and improve health care in North Korea, I have seen how sanctions have restricted the access to the most basic medicines and medical equipment in the isolated country,” said Kee Park, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, the director of the DPRK Program at the Korean American Medical Association, and one of seven authors of the report. “This has made treating infectious diseases, chronic diseases, and injuries much more difficult.”
“Sanctions delayed the delivery of life-saving treatment for children with disabilities due to the ban on importing metal in medical and rehabilitation equipment,” added Joy Yoon, a co-author of the report and co-founder of the nonprofit organization Ignis Community, which treats children with developmental disabilities such as cerebral palsy and autism at its Pyongyang Spine Rehabilitation Center. “Without immediate and timely medical intervention, many North Korean children with cerebral palsy and other developmental disabilities do not survive.”
Henri Feron, a co-author of the report and a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, said, “The findings in this report raise concerns that sanctions in their current form may be contrary to international law, in particular humanitarian and human rights norms. Sanctions also raise moral questions, as they effectively take the entire country’s population hostage.”
The Human Costs and Gendered Impact of Sanctions on North Korea was commissioned by Korea Peace Now! Women Mobilizing to End the War, a global campaign to educate, organize, and advocate for a Korea peace agreement, led by Women Cross DMZ, Nobel Women’s Initiative, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and Korean Women’s Movement for Peace.
To schedule an in-person interview with report authors, or to get more information, contact Kathleen Richards.
WHAT: Press conference featuring several authors of The Human Costs and Gendered Impact of Sanctions on North Korea
WHEN: Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2019, 10:30 a.m.-noon
WHERE: UN Church Center, 2nd Floor, 777 United Nations Plaza, New York
Posted in Press, Uncategorised
POST NAVIGATION
Activists slam slow DC pace on ending Korean war
North Korea Sanctions Contribute to Deaths of Innocent Civilians, Report Says
© 2020 Korea Peace Now.
동영상
https://story.kakao.com/lishi21/DAtXG8Govp0
Sections
Democracy Dies in Darkness
Sanctions are hurting aid efforts — and ordinary people — in North Korea

North Koreans push a cart carrying cabbage in Hamhung, on the country’s east coast, in November. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)
By Anna Fifield
December 16, 2017
TOKYO — Sanctions aimed at punishing the North Korean regime are hampering the ability of aid groups to operate inside the country, triggering warnings that the international campaign is harming ordinary North Koreans.
Difficulties in obtaining supplies, including medical equipment, and in transferring money to fund aid programs could have a direct impact on health and nutrition levels throughout North Korea, aid groups say.
"We need to deal with the nuclear problem, but we need to properly ponder our means for achieving that goal," Tomás Ojea Quintana, the U.N. special rapporteur on North Korean human rights, said in an interview in Tokyo.
About 70 percent of the North Korean population is already categorized as "food insecure," meaning constantly struggling against hunger, and growth stunting occurs in 1 in 4 children.
The sanctions could increase the levels of food insecurity and the incidence of acute malnutrition among children.
"These are not just statistics. This is reality in the DPRK," Quintana said, using the abbreviation for North Korea's official name.
"It's my responsibility to remind the Security Council that they should develop a comprehensive assessment of the possible impact of their sanctions," he said. "What is the concrete impact on humanitarian agencies working inside North Korea?"
The U.N. World Food Program, UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the U.N. Development Program all have operations in North Korea. A small number of humanitarian agencies based in the United States and elsewhere provide food, medicines and agricultural assistance from bases outside the country.
But the waves of multilateral and direct U.S. sanctions that have been imposed on Kim Jong Un's regime following its missile launches and nuclear tests have now made operations so difficult that some agencies are pulling out. Save the Children has shut down its operations in Pyongyang, billing the move as a "temporary suspension."
"U.S. and international humanitarian NGOs working in North Korea are experiencing death by a thousand cuts," said Keith Luse, executive director of the Washington-based National Committee on North Korea, which includes many humanitarian agencies among its members.
"These sanctions were not intended for them, but they have ended up being victims of the international sanctions regime," Luse said.

A truck enters the Rason Special Economic Zone as it makes its way across a bridge over the Tumen river marking the border between North Korea (bottom) and China (top). (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)
At a U.N. Security Council meeting Friday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that it was the responsibility of the North Korean regime to care for its own people.
"The regime could feed and care for women, children and ordinary people of North Korea if it chose the welfare of its people over weapons development," Tillerson said.
"It can reverse course, give up its unlawful nuclear weapons program, and join the community of nations, or it can continue to condemn its people to poverty and isolation," he said.
[Trump pledges new wave of ‘major sanctions’ on North Korea after call with China’s Xi ]
The difficulties have mounted as the crackdown has broadened, from "smart sanctions" designed to cut off parts and funding for the nuclear weapons program to more general measures that are starting to look like a trade embargo.
President Trump has vowed to use "maximum pressure" to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program.
Sanctions imposed in September through the Security Council, at the United States' instigation, banned North Korean exports of seafood, garments and coal, adding to previous prohibitions on commodities.
Japan, which holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council, is urging other member states to cut off humanitarian aid to North Korea.
The campaign is having a tangible impact.
The British government announced that it would no longer send assistance to North Korea. "We will use whatever means we have to make clear our displeasure at the reckless provocations from Kim Jong Un," Mark Field, the British minister of state for Asia, told South Korea's Yonhap News Agency in Seoul last month.
The South Korean government, which has vowed not to let political considerations affect humanitarian decisions, has not delivered on its September pledge to give $8 million to the World Food Program and UNICEF for children and pregnant women.
Seoul was still "in consultation" with the two agencies, said Unification Ministry spokeswoman Choi Ji-seon.
[Kim Jong Un’s North Korea: Life inside the totalitarian state ]
The relatively few aid agencies still working to help North Koreans face increasing bureaucratic challenges to operate in a country replete with difficulties.
The sanctions were becoming a "serious concern" for U.N. agencies operating in North Korea and could "hamper assistance and relief activities," Tapan Mishra, the U.N. resident coordinator in Pyongyang, wrote in letters to U.N. officials at the end of October.
"Crucial relief items, including medical equipment and drugs, have been held up for months despite being equipped with the required paperwork affirming that they are not on the list of sanctions items," he wrote in the letters, which were first reported by NK News, a specialist website.
Items that had been blocked included anesthesia machines used for emergency operations and digital X-ray machines needed to diagnose tuberculosis.
American aid agencies must get licenses from the Commerce or Treasury departments to send goods needed for their work into North Korea and now are required to get special dispensation to airfreight time-sensitive equipment, such as medical supplies, because Air Koryo, North Korea's national carrier, is under sanction.
"It's all very tricky and new for us," said one American humanitarian worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because sensitive negotiations were ongoing. "It's been weeks and months of back-and-forth and talking to lawyers. It's very complex and challenging, but if we don't do it, we can't continue."
Chinese customs officials are also cracking down on shipments to North Korea — and to a surprising extent, given Beijing's previous halfhearted implementation of international sanctions.
They have become stricter about shipments, asking for detailed inventories, including lists of manufacturers' names and materials used in every item. A container of wheelchairs sent by a South Korean aid agency was blocked by China, as were water purification tablets meant for flood victims, according to people with knowledge of the incidents.
[Retired military leaders urge Trump to choose words, not action, to deal with North Korea ]
A Pyongyang-based humanitarian worker said there were also "self-imposed sanctions" by suppliers in China.
"Chinese suppliers who had been sending us raw materials we need for our projects have just suddenly disappeared," the worker said, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize the humanitarian work. "They're not doing anything that's banned by sanctions, but they seem to have decided that it's not worth the exposure or the risk to their reputations."
Meanwhile, Chinese banks are refusing to handle any money related to North Korea, say humanitarian workers who are trying to wire money to Chinese suppliers of medical equipment for use inside North Korea — even when the supplier is Chinese-owned.
While foreign journalists invited to North Korea see the impressive construction projects in the capital, life is very different in the rest of the country, regular visitors say.
"It's going to be the people who are the most vulnerable, the people outside Pyongyang, who will suffer," said Kee Park, an American neurosurgeon who performs operations in North Korea.
The sanctions on the fishing, garment and coal industries, coupled with South Korea's decision to close a joint factory complex that employed more than 50,000 North Koreans, will deprive many people of their incomes in an economy that is increasingly market-based, Park said.
"Sanctions are designed to hurt so that the government will change its policy," he said. "But they're hurting the wrong people."
Anna FifieldAnna Fifield is The Washington Post’s bureau chief in Beijing, covering greater China. She was the Post's bureau chief in Tokyo between 2014 and 2018, writing about Japan and the two Koreas. She is the author of "The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un." Follow
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/sanctions-are-hurting-aid-efforts--and-ordinary-people--in-north-korea/2017/12/15/df57fe6e-e109-11e7-b2e9-8c636f076c76_story.html