North Korean Economy Watch

According to the Washington Post:

The Obama administration, concerned that Burma is expanding its military relationship with North Korea, has launched an aggressive campaign to persuade Burma’s junta to stop buying North Korean military technology, U.S. officials said.

Concerns about the relationship — which encompass the sale of small arms, missile components and technology possibly related to nuclear weapons — in part prompted the Obama administration in October to end the George W. Bush-era policy of isolating the military junta, said a senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Senior U.S. officials have since had four meetings with their Burmese counterparts, with a fifth expected soon. “Our most decisive interactions have been around North Korea,” the official said. “We’ve been very clear to Burma. We’ll see over time if it’s been heard.”

…

Underlining the administration’s concerns about Burma is a desire to avoid a repeat of events that unfolded in Syria in 2007. North Korea is thought to have helped Syria secretly build a nuclear reactor there capable of producing plutonium. The facility was reportedly only weeks or months away from being functional when Israeli warplanes bombed it in September of that year.

“The lesson here is the Syrian one,” said David Albright, president of the nongovernmental Institute for Science and International Security and an expert on nuclear proliferation. “That was such a massive intelligence failure. You can’t be sure that North Korea isn’t doing it someplace else. The U.S. government can’t afford to be blindsided again.”

Burma is thought to have started a military relationship with North Korea in 2007. But with the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution last June banning all weapons exports from North Korea, Burma has emerged “as a much bigger player than it was,” the senior U.S. official said.

In a report Albright co-wrote in January, titled “Burma: A Nuclear Wannabe,” he outlined the case for concern about Burma’s relations with North Korea. First, Burma has signed a deal with Russia for the supply of a 10-megawatt thermal research reactor, although construction of the facility had not started as of September.

Second, although many claims from dissident groups about covert nuclear sites in Burma are still unverified, the report said that “there remain legitimate reasons to suspect the existence of undeclared nuclear activities in Burma, particularly in the context of North Korean cooperation.”

Previous posts about the Myanmar-DPRK relationship can be found here. 

Read the full story here:
U.S. increasingly wary as Burma deepens military relationship with North Korea
Washington Post
John Pomfret
3/4/2010

According to Aung Zaw in the Wall Street Journal Aisa:

A government report leaked by a Burmese official last month shed new light on these ties. It described a Memorandum of Understanding between Burma and North Korea signed during a secret visit by Burmese officials to Pyongyang in November 2008. The visit was the culmination of years of work. Diplomatic relations between the two countries were cut in 1983 following a failed assassination attempt by North Korean agents on the life of South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan while he was visiting Rangoon. The attack cost 17 Korean lives and Burma cut off ties.

One of the first signs of warming relations was a barter agreement between the two countries that lasted from 2000 to 2006 and saw Burma receive between 12 and 16 M-46 field guns and as many as 20 million rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition from North Korea, according to defense analyst Andrew Selth of Griffith University in Australia. In exchange, Burma bartered food and rice.

The two countries formally re-established diplomatic relations in April 2007. After that, the North Korean ship the Kang Nam — the same ship that recently turned away from Burma after being followed by the U.S. navy — made a trip to Burma’s Thilawa port. Western defense analysts concluded that the ship carried conventional weapons and missiles to Burma.

This laid the ground for the MoU signed in November, when Shwe Mann, the regime’s third-most powerful figure, made a secret visit to North Korea, according to the leaked report. Shwe Mann is the chief of staff of the army, navy and air force, and the coordinator of Special Operations. He spent seven days in Pyongyang, traveling via China. His 17-member delegation received a tour around Pyongyang and Myohyang, where secret tunnels have been built into mountains to shelter aircraft, missiles, tanks and nuclear and chemical weapons.

The MoU he signed formalizes the military cooperation between the two countries. According to the terms of the document, North Korea will build or supervise the construction of special Burmese military facilities, including tunnels and caves in which missiles, aircraft and even naval ships could be hidden. Burma will also receive expert training for its special forces, air defense training, plus a language training program between personnel in the two armed forces.

Shwe Mann’s delegation also visited a surface-to-surface missile factory, partially housed in tunnels, on the outskirts of Pyongyang to observe missile production. The Burmese were particularly interested in short-range 107 mm and 240 mm multirocket launchers — a multipurpose, defensive missile system used in case of a foreign invasion. Also of great interest was the latest in antitank, laser-guided missile technology.

Previous Myanmar - DPRK posts here.

Read the full story below:
Burma and North Korea, Brothers in Arms
Wall Street Journal Asia
Aung Zaw
7/10/2009

Korea Herald and Yale Global
Bertil Linter
6/12/2009

Missiles and weapon technology, counterfeiting money and cigarette smuggling, front companies and restaurants in foreign countries, labor export to the Middle East - North Korea has been very innovative when it comes to raising badly needed foreign exchange for the regime in Pyongyang. But there is a less known trade in service that the North Koreans have offered to its foreign clients: expertise in tunneling. A fascinating new glimpse of this business has now been offered in secret photos from Burma obtained by this correspondent.

The photos, taken between 2003 and 2006, show that while the rest of the world is speculating about the outcome of long-awaited elections in Burma, the ruling military junta has been busy digging in for the long haul - literally. North Korean technicians have helped them construct underground facilities where they can survive any threats from their own people as well as the outside world. It is not known if the tunnels are linked to Burma’s reported efforts to develop nuclear technology - in which the North Koreans allegedly are active as well. (See Burma’s Nuclear Temptation by Bertil Lintner, YaleGlobal, Dec. 3, 2008)

The photographs published here show that an extensive network of underground installations was built near Burma’s new, fortified capital Naypyidaw. In November 2005, the military moved its administration from the old capital Rangoon to an entirely new site that was carved out of the wilderness 460 kilometers north of Rangoon.

Meaning the “Abode of Kings,” Naypyidaw is meant to symbolize the power of the military and its desire to build a new state based on the tradition of Burma’s pre-colonial warrior kings. But underground facilities were apparently deemed necessary to secure the military’s grip on power. Additional tunnels and underground meeting halls have been built near Taunggyi, the capital of Burma’s northeastern Shan State and the home of several of the country’s decades-long insurgencies. Some of the pictures, taken in June 2006, show a group of technicians in civilian dress walking out of a government guesthouse in the Naypyidaw area. Asian diplomats have identified those technicians, with features distinct from the Burmese workers around them, as North Koreans.

This is quite a turn around as Burma severed relations with Pyongyang in 1983 after North Korean agents planted a bomb at Rangoon’s Martyrs Mausoleum killing 18 visiting South Korean officials, including the then-deputy prime minister and three other government ministers.

Secret talks between Burmese and North Korean diplomats began in Bangkok in the early 1990s. The two sides had discovered that despite the hostile act in the previous decade they had a lot in common. Both had come under unprecedented international condemnation, especially by the United States, because of their blatant disregard for the most basic human rights and Pyongyang for its nuclear weapons program. Burma also needed more military hardware to suppress an increasingly rebellious urban population as well as ethnic rebels in the frontier areas. North Korea needed food, rubber and other essentials - and was willing to accept barter deals, which suited the cash-strapped Burmese generals. “They have both drawn their wagons in a circle ready to defend themselves,” a Bangkok-based Western diplomat said. “Burma’s generals admire the North Koreans for standing up to the United States and wish they could do the same.”

After an exchange of secret visits, North Korean armaments began to arrive in Burma. The curious relationship between Burma and North Korea was first disclosed in the Hong Kong-based weekly Far Eastern Economic Review on July 10, 2003. A group of 15-20 North Korean technicians were then seen at a government guesthouse near the old capital Rangoon. The report was met with skepticism, especially because of the 1983 Rangoon bombings. But, when North Korean-made field artillery pieces were seen in Burma in the early 2000s, it became clear that North Korea had found a new ally - several years before diplomatic relations between the two countries were restored in April 2007.

“While based on a 1950s Russian design, these weapons (the field guns) were battle-tested and reliable,” Australian Burma scholar Andrew Selth stated in a 2004 working paper for the Australian National University. “They significantly increased Burma’s long-range artillery capabilities, which were then very weak.” Since then, Burma has also taken delivery of North Korean truck-mounted, multiple rocket launchers and possibly also surface-to-air missiles for its Chinese-supplied naval vessels.

Then came the tunneling experts. Most of Pyongyang’s own defense industries, including its chemical and biological-weapons programs, and many other military as well as government installations are underground. This includes known factories at Ganggye and Sakchu, where thousands of technicians and workers labor in a maze of tunnels dug under mountains. The export of such know-how to Burma was first documented in June 2006, when intelligence agencies intercepted a message from Naypyidaw confirming the arrival of a group of North Korean tunneling experts at the site. Today, three years later, the dates on the photos published today confirm the accuracy of this report. By now, the tunnels and underground installations should be completed, as would those near Taunggyi. This well-hidden complex ensures there is no danger of irate civilians storming government buildings, as they did during the massive pro-democracy uprising in August-September 1988. Sources say that the internationally isolated military junta may also consider these deep bunkers as their last repair in case of air strikes of the kind that the Taliban in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq endured.

It is not clear how much, or what, Burma has paid for the assistance provided by the North Korean experts, but it could be food - or gold, which is found in riverbeds in northern Burma. Or some other mineral. Burma, of course, is not the only foreign tunneling venture by North Korea.

In southern Lebanon following the 2006 war, Israel’s Defense Forces and the United Nations found several of the underground complexes, which by then had been abandoned by Hezbollah militants. By coincidence or not, these tunnels and underground rooms - some big enough for meetings to be held there - are strikingly similar to those the South Koreans have unearthed under the Demilitarized Zone that separates South from North Korea. Under small, manhole cover-sized entrances hidden under grass and bushes were steel-lined shafts with ladders leading down to big rooms with electricity, ventilation, bathrooms with showers and drainage systems. Some of the tunnels are 40 meters deep and located only 100 meters from the Israeli border. North Korea’s possible involvement in digging these tunnels is however, difficult to ascertain. According to Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman, a senior officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who had defected to the West, revealed that, “thanks to the presence of hundreds of Iranian engineers and technicians, and experts from North Korea who were brought in by Iranian diplomats ?¶ Hezbollah succeeded in building a 25-kilometer subterranean strip in South Lebanon.”

Beirut sources suggest that it is more likely that Hezbollah has used North Korean designs and blueprints given to them by their Syrian or Iranian allies - both of whom are close to the North Koreans. (Both Iran and Syria have acquired missile technology from North Korea, and what was believed to be a secret nuclear reactor in Syria built with North Korean help was destroyed by the Israeli air force in September 2007.) Either way, North Korean expertise in tunneling has become a valuable commodity for export. And Pyongyang is flexible about the method of payment as long as it helps the international pariah regime.

Bertil Lintner is a Swedish journalist based in Thailand and the author of several works on Asia, including “Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia” and “Great Leader, Dear Leader: Demystifying North Korea under the Kim Clan.” He can be reached at lintner@asiapacificms.com - Ed.

UPDATE: Burmese whistle-blowers sentenced to death
BBC
1/7/10

Two Burmese officials have been sentenced to death for leaking details of secret government visits to North Korea and Russia, the BBC has learned.

The officials were also found guilty of leaking information about military tunnels allegedly built in Burma by North Korea, a source in Burma said.

A third person was jailed for 15 years, the source added.

The military rulers in Burma (Myanmar) have so far made no public comments on the case.

The source told BBC Burmese that Win Naing Kyaw, a former army major, and Thura Kyaw, a clerk at the European desk of Burma’s foreign ministry, had been sentenced to death by a court in Rangoon on Thursday.

They were found guilty of leaking information about government visits to North Korea and Russia, which reportedly took place in 2008 and 2006.

The two men were also convicted of leaking details of a network of tunnels reportedly being built in Burma.

It is thought the tunnels were built to house communications systems, possible weapons factories and troops in the event of an invasion.

The third man, Pyan Sein, was given 15 years in prison on Thursday.

Burma still has capital punishment, but it has not carried out executions in recent years.

Myanmar severed diplomatic relations with the DPRK after North Korean agents attempted to assassinate South Korea  president Chun Doo Hwan on his October 1983 visit to Rangoon.

Diplomatic relations between the two countries were restored in April 2007.  Shortly after, North Korea was accused of selling rocket launchers to Myanmar’s SPDC (Orwellian acronym for: State Peace and Development Council)–formerly known as SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council).

Now the AFP reports that trade has expanded into natural resources, with which Myanmar is abundantly blessed:

Military-run Myanmar is to begin exporting rubber to North Korea, in a further warming of relations between the reclusive governments of the two countries, a weekly newspaper reported Tuesday.

“They will start by importing at least 10,000 tonnes within the first year,” Khaing Myint of the Myanmar Rubber Planters and Producers Association was quoted as saying by the Myanmar Times.

“We are extremely pleased to add another client nation to our export destinations for our rubber. We expect the first batch to be delivered in October,” Khaing Myint reportedly said.

Read the full article here:
Myanmar to begin rubber exports to North Korea
AFP
8/19/2008

Reuters excerpt: 

North Korea has been selling multiple rocket launchers to military-ruled Myanmar since the two countries restored ties last year in violation of U.N. sanctions, Japan’s NHK public broadcaster reported.

Quoting unspecified diplomatic sources, NHK said in a report late on Wednesday that the launchers were the same type as those deployed near the demilitarized zone separating the Korean peninsula.

The report could not be independently confirmed.

A Security Council resolution passed after North Korea’s 2006 nuclear test blocks trade with the secretive communist country in dangerous weapons, heavy conventional weapons and luxury goods.

Read the whole story here:
North Korea sells rocket launchers to Myanmar: report
Reuters
4/3/2008

Joong Ang Daily
Brian Lee
11/1/2007

Newspapers indicate a desire for more outside interactions

North Korea is increasingly sending out signals through its state media indicating a desire to interact more with the outside world.

The North’s communist party newspaper Rodong Sinmun said in an editorial earlier this week that it is no longer a time for production and construction to be achieved through the workers’ bare hands alone.

“We are stressing self-sufficiency, but that does not mean we are disregarding international economic relations while striving to build our economy,” the newspaper said. “The republic has always maintained its position that it wants to have good relations, even with capitalist countries.”

The Chosun Sinbo, a pro-Pyongyang newspaper in Japan widely believed to be representing North Korea’s views, also said this week that progress in the six-party talks reflected Pyongyang’s political will to improve ties with neighboring countries.

“The nuclear test was Pyongyang’s tool to change the stalemate with Washington,” said Koh Yoo-hwan, a North Korean specialist at Dongguk University. “It got its attention and now both sides are talking. The diplomatic exchanges with other countries are a sign from the North that it can accept capitalist methods and that it is open to the outside. This is not coming just out of the blue. In the North everything is planned from the top and all these moves are done strategically. They want to connect to the outside.”

Yesterday, North Korea restored diplomatic ties with Burma after 24 years of severed ties over the North’s involvement in a bomb attack on South Korean cabinet members in 1983, The Associated Press reported.

North Korean Premier Kim Yong-il has also embarked on a rare sweep of the Asian region, visiting Vietnam last week with Malaysia, Cambodia and Laos also on his itinerary.

Washington has tried in its own way to lure the isolated North more into the open.

A visit by the New York Philharmonic to the North is being pondered while the JoongAng Sunday reported that the North’s women’s soccer team may visit the United States.

In a related development, Christopher Hill, Washington’s chief representative to the six-party talks, met with his North Korean counterpart Kim Gye-gwan in Beijing yesterday to discuss progress in the nuclear negotiations.

Hill is scheduled to arrive in Seoul today to brief officials here on the meeting, a government official said yesterday on condition of anonymity.

Foreign Minister Song Min-soon told reporters a U.S. team of nuclear experts is scheduled to enter the North today to take actual steps to disable the North’s key nuclear facilities. Pyongyang said earlier this week that such measures would start within this week.

Yonhap
9/14/2007

North Korea and Myanmar on Friday signed an agreement on cooperation between their foreign ministries, the North’s official news agency reported without providing details.

“An agreement on cooperation between the foreign ministries of the DPRK and Myanmar was inked here on Friday,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in a dispatch from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

The DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name.

The agreement is viewed as the first concrete step toward normalizing the countries’ relations since they agreed to re-establish diplomatic ties in April.

Myanmar severed its ties with the communist North in 1983 following a failed assassination attempt by North Korean agents on then South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan, who was visiting the south Asian nation.

Twenty-one people, including South Korean Cabinet ministers and presidential aides, were killed in the 1983 bombing.

Friday’s agreement was signed by the North’s Vice Foreign Minister Kim Yong-il and his Myanmarese counterpart U Kyaw Thu, according to the KCNA report.

Joong Ang Daily
ser Myo Ja
4/27/2007

North Korea and Burma, two of the world’s harshest dictatorships, agreed yesterday to restore diplomatic ties 24 years after Pyongyang was implicated in a deadly bomb attack which targeted South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan, who was visiting Rangoon.

North Korea’s vice foreign minister, Kim Young-il, arrived in Rangoon, the former capital of Burma, also known as Myanmar, on Wednesday. Kim and Kyaw Thu, Burma’s deputy foreign minister, signed an agreement yesterday to reestablish relations between the two countries, Thu said.

The specifics of the agreement were not released.

The October 9, 1983 bombing was one of the most audacious acts of terror ever attributed to a nation-state. During an official visit, Chun planned to lay a wreath at a mausoleum dedicated to Aung San, the founder of modern Burma. Chun was delayed by traffic, but 21 people were killed, including three Korean cabinet ministers, when bombs in the roof of the mausoleum exploded. Burma quickly blamed the attack on North Korea.

Shortly after the bombing, Burmese authorities arrested three North Korean agents, one of whom killed himself. The other two were convicted and sentenced to death. Jin Mo was executed in 1985, but Kang Min-chol’s sentence was reduced to life in prison because he confessed.

Kang, 51, has been held at Insein prison near Rangoon. Irrawaddy, a magazine published by Burmese exiles, reported in its current issue that Kang did not wish to return to either Korea if he is released from prison. A former inmate told the magazine, “Kang said he did not want to go to the North because he would be treated as a traitor and he did not want to go to the South because he would be punished for the terror.”

North Korea has denied responsibility for the incident, claiming that it was a South Korean conspiracy to frame the North.

South Korea respects Myanmar’s decision to restore ties with N. Korea
Yonhap
4/26/2007

South Korea respects Myanmar’s decision to restore diplomatic ties with North Korea, a government spokesman said Thursday.

The spokesman said that South Korea expects the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries after 24 years will provide momentum for North Korea’s opening and contribute to peace and stability in the region.

Myanmar severed ties with North Korea following a bomb attack by North Korean agents on the entourage of then South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan at the Aung San Mausoleum in Yangoon in October 1983.

Meanwhile, North Korea confirmed foreign news reports that the two sides agreed to reopen diplomatic relations, quoting a joint communique on the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the DPRK and the Union of Myanmar.

DPRK is the acronym for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official title.

The North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported, “According to the joint communique, the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the government of the Union of Myanmar, desirous of developing friendly relations and bilateral cooperation between the two countries and peoples, based on the principles of respect for each other’s sovereignty, non-interference in their internal affairs, and equality and mutual benefit, as well as the norms of international law and the objectives and principles of the United Nations Charter, have agreed to reestablish diplomatic relations at the ambassadorial level in accordance with the provisions of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 18th April 1961.”