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Japan prepares to bar remittances to DPRK

Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

from the BBC:

Japan’s government says it has begun work on its own set of sanctions on North Korea, in addition to those agreed by the UN Security Council. 

Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe says he has instructed officials to put in place procedures to ban cash remittances to the impoverished North.

After days of talks the UN Security Council unanimously passed a resolution on Saturday which condemned the tests.

But it was a milder document than Japan’s original draft.

The resolution was tabled in response to North Korea’s decision to test-fire seven missiles earlier this month, including a long-range Taepodong-2, which is believed capable of reaching Alaska.

In the immediate aftermath of the test-firings, Japan imposed limited sanctions against North Korea, including a decision to ban a North Korean trade ferry from Japanese ports and a moratorium on charter flights from Pyongyang.

But now Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe has asked for an investigation into possible further sanctions.

“We have started preparations to properly achieve necessary steps involving financial restrictions,” Mr Abe told a news conference on Tuesday, although he added that Japan would consult with other nations before making a final decision.

He said he had instructed officials to start procedures to ban cash remittances by Koreans living in Japan who are sympathetic towards Kim Jong-il’s government – an important source of foreign currency for North Koreans.

Indications that Tokyo was about to take further steps against Pyongyang were reported in Japanese media on Monday, but now Mr Abe has made his intentions official in a press conference.

Japan could also place bans on bilateral trade and freeze North Korean assets, according to the newspaper reports.

Japan is one of North Korea’s most vehement critics – and takes a more hardline stance on Pyongyang’s activities than other countries in the region.

Chapter Seven dropped

The UN resolution passed over the weekend demands that North Korea suspend its ballistic missile programme, and bars all UN member states from supplying Pyongyang with material related to missiles.

It was passed unanimously by the Security Council after being revised to drop any mention of Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, which is legally binding and can authorise military action. The changes were made to appease China and Russia, which took a softer line than Japan and the US. China had threatened to veto the resolution in its original form.

As soon as the resolution was passed, North Korea’s ambassador to the UN rejected it and left the chamber.

A day later Pyongyang angrily denounced the resolution in a foreign ministry statement, and said it would continue to build up its military arsenal.

The statement described the resolution as the product of a hostile American policy and said Pyongyang would not be bound by it, and would “bolster its war deterrent” in every way.

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US could reimpose pre-1999 sanctions

Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

Joong Ang Daily
7/19/2007

The Bush administration is weighing the reinstatement of trade sanctions on North Korea that were lifted during the Clinton administration. A visiting U.S. Treasury Department official, Stuart Levey, described Washington’s policy direction to Korean government policymakers during a visit here from Sunday through Tuesday. Yesterday, a government official described those discussions to journalists, and the Treasury posted a cautious statement by Mr. Levey on its Web site.

The Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence had planned his visit before the July 5 North Korean missile tests, but the incident added urgency to the consultations. Giving no details of the content of the discussions, Mr. Levey said in his statement he and Korean officials had discussed issues including “the new United Nations Security Council resolution that requires all member states to prevent the transfer of any financial resources in relation to DPRK’s missile or WMD programs.”

Mr. Levey is also stopping in Tokyo, Hanoi and Singapore on his swing through Asia. Seoul was his first stop. The trip came at a time when Japan is planning its own sanctions, perhaps including a ban on cash remittances to the North.

A government official said yesterday that the undersecretary met with Vice Foreign Minister Yu Myung- hwan and officials from the Ministry of Finance and the Blue House. The official stressed that the meeting was not a consultation on policy toward the North. He said the topics included many international financial issues, but did not touch in any detail on Seoul’s participation in the Kaesong Industrial Complex and tourist trips to Mount Kumgang, both of which are revenue sources for North Korea.

Another official said Mr. Levey responded only with a nod to explanations of the purposes and justifications for those inter-Korean projects.

The Korean officials said the U.S. sanctions Mr. Levey mentioned had been lifted in 1999 by President Bill Clinton as U.S.-North Korea tensions eased. They included trade restrictions and licensing requirements and strict limits on the amount of money U.S. travelers to North Korea could spend there.

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DPRK suspends family reunions

Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

Well, since the ROK has suspended further food/fertilizer aid to the DPRK in response to the current missle situation, the DPRK has suspended family reunions.

From the Joong Ang:

In a tit-for-tat reaction to Seoul’s decision to suspend rice and fertilizer aid, Pyongyang yesterday canceled a separated family reunion and said future ones were in jeopardy.

The Korea Central News Agency broadcast a letter from the North Korean Red Cross to its counterpart in Seoul. The letter said Seoul had refused to talk seriously about a family reunion the North had proposed be held during the Chuseok holidays in October. “Furthermore,” the letter continued, “the South refused to ship rice and fertilizer, one of the inter-Korean humanitarian projects that are conducted on the basis of reciprocity.” Pyongyang, the letter went on, sees no reason to continue family reunions.

“We want to make clear that the video conference call reunion, scheduled to mark August 15, and the construction of a reunion venue at Mount Kumgang will be terminated,” the letter concluded. The Japanese surrendered on Aug. 15, 1945, to end World War II. Both Koreas celebrate a Liberation Day holiday on that date. Although reunions have been held frequently at Mount Kumgang, the two Koreas had agreed to build a permanent reunion site there rather than using tourist hotels.

The Unification Ministry said it would do its best to restart the reunions. It said it anticipated that reaction by Pyongyang but regretted it.

And from the BBC:

The North accused the South of “sacrificing” humanitarian co-operation under pressure from Japan and the US.

Seoul announced the suspension of rice and fertiliser deliveries after inter-Korea talks collapsed last week.

The talks followed North Korea’s missile tests on 5 July, which have raised international concern.

Pyongyang test-fired seven missiles, including a long-range Taepodong-2 believed capable of reaching Alaska.

South Korea says it will not discuss further humanitarian aid with its neighbour until progress is made on resolving issues relating to the missile tests and the North’s nuclear ambitions.

After the high-level talks in Busan fell apart last week, the delegation from Pyongyang issued a statement warning of consequences for inter-Korean ties.

In the latest statement, North Korea’s Red Cross head Jang Jae-on accused the South of “abusing the humanitarian issue for meeting its sinister purpose to serve the outsiders”.

“Our side is, therefore, of the view that it has become impossible to hold any discussion related to humanitarian issues, to say nothing of arranging any reunion between separated families and relatives between the two sides,” he said.

A video reunion meeting scheduled for 15 August would not take place and the planned construction of a reunion centre in the North’s Mt Kumgang was “impossible”, he said.

The reunions bring together families divided by the partitioning of the Korean Peninsula in 1953. The policy has been a key part of reconciliation efforts between the two Koreas.

Earlier, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun told a meeting of security advisers that Pyongyang’s missile tests were “wrong behaviour” that increased regional tensions.

But he warned against overreacting, saying: “An excessive response to North Korea’s missile tests creates unnecessary tensions and confrontation.”

On Tuesday, the Japanese government said it had begun work on its own set of sanctions for North Korea, in addition to those agreed by the UN Security Council.

The council unanimously passed a resolution on Saturday which condemned the missile launches, but it was softer than the draft initially proposed by Japan.

Japan would look into banning cash remittances to the North from Korean residents, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe told reporters.

But on Wednesday, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said he would not rush to impose more sanctions.

“We should wait and see for a while whether North Korea will seriously respond to the (UN) resolution,” he said.

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ROK halts DPRK humanitarian aid

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

The 2005 winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics were selected for “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis”.  I would check out thier work in order to make sense of the current DPRK/ROK diplomatic posturing.

From the Washington Post:

South Korea on Thursday suspended humanitarian aid to North Korea until it agrees to return to international nuclear disarmament talks.

The action infuriated visiting North Korean officials, who immediately cut off high-level talks in South Korea and stormed back home.

The decision to postpone consideration of a North Korean request for 500,000 tons of rice marked the South’s first punitive action against its impoverished communist neighbor since it defied the international community and test fired seven missiles, including a long-range Taepodong-2, on July 4.

The move came as the administration of South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun has come under sharp public criticism at home for what many there viewed as a weak response by Seoul to the North’s missile tests.

South Korea on Thursday reiterated its deep opposition to a push by Japan and the United States to impose broader sanctions on North Korea through a draft resolution at the United Nation’s Security Council. Seoul has also vowed to maintain its “sunshine policy” of engagement, which has fostered the warmest ties between the Stalinist North and capitalist South since the Korean War divided them in two more than half a century ago.

But the decision to follow through with a previous threat to suspend food aid if North Korea tested missiles — a threat many experts doubted the South Koreans would stick to — displayed a new willingness by the South to use its significant economic clout to apply pressure on the North.

The North Koreans — for whom economic assistance by South Korea is topped only by China — appeared jolted by the decision. At talks being held in the South Korean city of Pusan that were originally scheduled to end Friday, Pyongyang’s delegation abruptly departed Thursday afternoon.

South Korea’s Yonhap news service reported that the North Korean officials left after circulating a statement calling the rupture the result of “reckless” attempts by South Korea to raise “irrelevant issues.” Those issues, South Korean officials said, were the recent missile tests and the North’s refusal to return to six-party talks on its nuclear programs.

The North bitterly condemned Seoul’s decision to suspend food aid, saying “the South side will pay a price before the nation for causing the collapse of the ministerial talks and bringing a collapse of North-South relations.”

South Korean officials, who in recent years have rolled out the red carpet for their visiting North Korean kin, this time offered them a simple meal and welcome bereft of customary sightseeing excursions and photo opportunities. When the North’s representatives understood they would not be returning with promises for more food aid, they simply left.

“The North Korean side expressed their position that additional negotiations would be unnecessary under the circumstance that additional humanitarian aid they need would be impossible,” Lee Kwan Se, a South Korean Unification Ministry official, told reporters.

For the United States and Japan, both pushing for a strong draft resolution at the United Nations that would ban international trade of North Korean missile and other military technology, the South Korean action was a rare diplomatic bright spot.

Christopher Hill, Washington’s top envoy on North Korea, left Beijing for Washington on Thursday after it became clear that Chinese efforts to persuade the Pyongyang government to come back to the six-party talks had apparently failed.

Before leaving, Hill said there was no indication that the North Koreans had changed their position to boycott the talks, which have been stalled since last November.

Japan, which has been deeply rattled by the North’s missile tests, vowed to continue pushing for a tough resolution that would impose sanctions on the North Koreas. But China and Russia back their alterative U.N. resolution unveiled on Wednesday. That draft would censure North Korea for its missile tests, but would endorse only voluntary measures aimed at restraining Pyongyang’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs.

“The Chinese are as baffled as we are,” Hill told reporters in Beijing before departing. “China has done so much for that country and that country seems intent on taking all of China’s generosity and then giving nothing back.”

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service

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Summary of current and proposed trade sanctions on DPRK

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

From the Korea Times:

You may be surprised to hear that North Korea is either in violation, or the target, of more than 13 U.S. laws, which include laws dealing with transfer of missile technology to other countries and human rights issues. Three of these laws, however, have direct bearing on U.S. economic sanctions against North Korea.

The first is the U.S. Export Control Act of 1949 that became the basis for the U.S. invoking a total embargo against North Korea on June 28, 1950, only three days after North Korea invaded South Korea. The second is the Trade Agreement Extension Act of 1951 that was the basis for banning the most favored nation (MFN) tariffs on North Korea’s exports to the United States. As you know, all member countries of the World Trade Organization have to abide by the MFN regulation that requires these nations to levy the same low tariffs to all member nations of the WTO. Without MFN, there is no way for North Korea to export anything to the U.S. because higher tariffs make them impossible to compete. The MFN is so widely spread that it is now known as the normal trade relation (NTR). North Korea was denied MFN tariff status on September 1, 1951.

The third is the Export Administration Act of 1979 that allowed North Korea to be branded as a terrorist state when its agents blew up KAL 007 on November 19, 1987. At the time of the explosion, Korean Air Lines 007 was in flight from Bagdad (Iraq) to Bankok (Thailand). The explosion killed 115 passengers and crew. On January 20, 1988, North Korea was placed on the list of countries supporting international terrorism.

Placement on the list made it impossible for North Korea to borrow development funds from international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

On May 25-28, 1999, former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry visited North Korea and delivered a U.S. proposal. On September 13, 1999, North Korea responded positively by pledging to freeze long-range missile tests. On September 17, 1999, President Clinton agreed to the first significant easing of economic sanctions against North Korea since the end of the Korean War in 1953 by announcing the lifting of most export restrictions applied to North Korea in response to North Korea’s willingness to cease long-range missile testing.

Details of eased U.S. economic sanctions on North Korea were announced on June 19, 2000. Key provisions included that the ban on exports to North Korea had ended, that U.S. passports were valid for travel to North Korea, and that U.S. travel service providers were authorized to organize group tours to North Korea. Among the notable U.S. sanctions that were not lifted are the denial of MFN status and the placement on the list of countries supporting international terrorism.

You may wonder what more economic sanctions can be levied against North Korea beyond the three already in place. To answer this question, you need to know the extent of North Korea’s foreign trade.

Contrary to what you may have heard or believe, latest United Nations trade data indicate that North Korea has trade relations of imports, exports or both with no less than 108 countries, which exclude South Korea because inter-Korean trade is not recorded as trade data in the U.S. trade database. North Korea’s major trading partners in 2004 were, in order of the amount, China ($585,651,972), Japan (164,101,115), Germany ($100,739,000), Brazil ($73,412,125), and Mexico ($47,662,978) for exports, and China ($799,450,316), Russia ($204,818,560), Brazil ($169,921,763), India ($121,080,999), and Netherlands ($120,525,232) for imports. The total amount of North Korea’s exports for 2004 was $1,256,533,361, while the total amount of North Korea’s imports for the same year was $1,937,738,240, with the trade deficit of $681,204,879, representing no less than 54.2 percent of total exports.

Now you have an idea. The new economic sanctions may take the form of a multi-national ban of trade with North Korea. The new economic sanctions may also include a complete ban of any transfer of money to North Korea from many Koreans who live in Japan and support North Korea.

There is no doubt that a complete ban of North Korea’s foreign trade, if imposed, would easily lower the current North Korean GNP to the 1999 level when hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of North Koreans starved to death.

In view of the large number of countries engaged in trade with North Korea, it would be impossible to impose a complete ban on North Korea’s foreign trade without naval blockade, which may escalate tensions on the Korean peninsula so rapidly that China and South Korea may not be willing to go along with multilateral economic sanctions.

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Japanese tax authorities crack down on DPRK aid

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

From the Donga:

The Japanese media reported on July 10 that the Japanese prosecutors and taxation authorities raided a private organization providing humanitarian assistance to North Korea and a construction company supporting the aid group.

The Tokyo District Public Prosecutors’ Office and the National Tax Agency searched an office of “Rainbow Bridge,” a private group in Tokyo.

The group was established to provide North Koreans with clothes, food, trucks and power generators free of charge in April, 2000. In 2003, the secretary-general of the group drew attention after he visited the Stalinist country, met six offspring of abducted Japanese citizens, and brought and gave their photos and letters to their parents who had arrived in Japan.

The search was reportedly part of an investigation into Mizutani, a construction company on suspicion of tax evasion.

With regard to reasons to support Rainbow Bridge, Mizutani explained to the investigation authorities they considered it as an investment needed to prepare business in North Korea.

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What is the DPRK-China realtionship

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

An interesting strategic analysis fo the DPRK/PRC realtionship in a regional competition context.  From the Council on Foreign Relations:

Introduction
China and North Korea have been allies for more than half a century. Beijing is a key provider of food and fuel to Kim Jung-Il’s regime, and it is heavily invested in preventing a destabilizing regime collapse that would send North Korean refugees flooding across its northeastern border. But as Kim tests ballistic missiles and develops his nation’s nuclear weapons capacity, China may be rethinking its support.

How strong is the current relationship between North Korea and China?
China has supported North Korea since Chinese fighters flooded onto the Korean peninsula to fight for the Communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in 1950. Since the Korean War divided the peninsula between the North and South, China has given both political and economic backing to North Korea’s leaders: Kim Il Sung, and his son and successor, Kim Jung-Il. In recent years, China has been seen as one of the authoritarian regime’s few allies.

On July 4, North Korea test-fired a series of ballistic missiles despite explicit warnings from Beijing, Tokyo, and Washington. This led to an unusually public rebuke from Chinese officials, a sign of strain in the relationship. Despite their long alliance, experts say Beijing cannot control Pyongyang. “In general, Americans tend to overestimate the influence China has over North Korea,” says Daniel Pinkston, a Korea specialist and director of the East Asia nonproliferation program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California. At the same time, China has too much invested in North Korea to halt or withdraw its support entirely. “The idea that the Chinese would turn their backs on the North Koreans is clearly wrong,” says Adam Segal, the Maurice R. Greenberg senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

How does North Korea benefit from the relationship?
Pyongyang is economically dependent on China, which provides most of its food and energy supplies. North Korea gets about 70 percent of its food and 70 to 80 percent of its fuel from China. Beijing is Pyongyang’s largest trading partner, and an estimated 300,000 North Koreans live in China, many of them migrant workers who send much-needed remittances back home.

China is also a strong political ally. “As an authoritarian regime that reformed, they understand what Kim Jung-Il is most concerned with—survival,” Segal says. China has repeatedly blocked UN Security Council resolutions against North Korea, including some threatening sanctions. China has also hosted the Six-Party Talks, a series of meetings in which North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, and the United States have tried to resolve the security concerns associated with North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. There and in other international forums, China is seen as a buffer between North Korea and the United States and Japan, which favor punitive sanctions and other measures to prevent Pyongyang from gaining nuclear weapons.

How does China benefit?
China’s support for Pyongyang ensures a stable nation on its northeastern border, as well as providing a buffer zone between China and democratic South Korea. North Korea’s allegiance is also important for China as a bulwark against U.S. military dominance of the region and the rise of Japan’s military. And China gains economically from its association with North Korea; growing numbers of Chinese firms are investing in North Korea and gaining concessions like preferable trading terms and port operations. Chinese trade and investment in North Korea now totals $2 billion per year. “They’re becoming a stakeholder in the North Korean economy,” Pinkston says.

What are the drawbacks to the relationship?
Pyongyang is not an ally Beijing can count on. Kim Jung-Il’s foreign policy is, like its leader, highly unpredictable. “North Korea is extremely difficult to deal with, even as an ally,” says Daniel Sneider, the associate director for research at Stanford’s Asia-Pacific Research Center and a former longtime foreign correspondent specializing in Asia. “This is not a warm and fuzzy relationship,” he says. “North Korean officials look for reasons to defy Beijing.” Some experts say the missile tests were just one example of North Korea pushing back against China’s influence. “”It was certainly a sign of independence [and] a willingness to send a message to China as well as everyone else,” Segal says. The Chinese, who favor “quiet diplomacy” with North Korea instead of public statements, took the unusual step of making public the fact that Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, warned North Korea not to launch their missiles. The fact that Pyongyang did anyway has hurt China’s image, other experts say.

What kind of leverage does Beijing have over Pyongyang?
Not as much as outsiders think, experts say. Beijing has bullied or bribed Pyongyang officials to get them to the negotiating table at the Six-Party Talks many times. “It’s clear that the Chinese have enormous leverage on North Korea in many respects,” Sneider says. “But can China actually try to exercise that influence without destabilizing the regime? Probably not.” Pinkston says that for all his country’s growing economic ties with China, Kim still makes up his own mind: “At the end of the day, China has little influence over the military decisions.”

What are China’s goals for its engagement with North Korea?
“For the Chinese, stability and the avoidance of war are the top priorities,” Sneider says. “From that point of view, the North Koreans are a huge problem for them, because Pyongyang could trigger a war on its own.” Stability is a huge worry for Beijing because of the specter of hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees flooding into China. “The Chinese are most concerned about the collapse of North Korea leading to chaos on the border,” Segal says.

If North Korea does provoke a war with the United States, China and South Korea would bear the brunt of any military confrontation on the Korean peninsula. Yet both those countries have been hesitant about pushing Pyongyang too hard, for fear of making Kim’s regime collapse. “They’re willing to live with a degree of ambiguity over North Korea’s military capability,” Sneider says, as long as Pyongyang doesn’t cross the “red line” of nuclear testing. Even then, “the Chinese can live with a nuclear North Korea, because they see the weapon as a deterrent against the United States, not them,” agrees Segal. But North Korea’s military moves could start an arms race in Northeast Asia and are already strengthening militarism in Japan, which could push for its own nuclear weapons if North Korea officially goes nuclear.

How does Washington factor into the relationship?
The United States has pushed North Korea to verifiably and irreversibly give up its uranium enrichment activities before Washington will agree to bilateral talks. Experts say Washington and Beijing have very different views on the issue. “Washington believes in using pressure to influence North Korea to change its behavior, while Chinese diplomats and scholars have a much more negative view of sanctions and pressure tactics,” Pinkston says. “They tend to see public measures as humiliating and counterproductive.” Since U.S. officials have repeatedly refused North Korean invitations to establish bilateral talks, “the Chinese have some sympathy for the North Korean view that the United States is not interested in negotiating,” Segal says.

Pinkston says the adversarial Pyongyang-Washington ties will likely not improve. “I don’t think the relationship with the Bush administration is reparable,” he says. “It’s a complete disaster, and someone else has to pick up the pieces. We can only hope it doesn’t degenerate more, but that the status quo will be maintained” until a new U.S. administration takes over, he says. In the meantime, U.S. pundits and lawmakers who push China to take what it sees as destabilizing actions in its region—i.e. support punitive actions or sanctions against North Korea—”are living in a different world,” Pinkston says.

“There’s always been a difference between how the Chinese felt we should approach these negotiations and how the Bush administration felt about it,” Sneider says. “That tension has always been there, and both governments have gone out of their way to obscure that gap because they’re well aware that the North Koreans are good at exploiting those differences.”

What is likely to happen to the China-North Korea relationship?
Despite the tensions caused by the recent missile tests, the relationship will likely continue to be close. Each side has too much invested in the other to drastically change the situation, experts say. If North Korea continues to test missiles, it’s possible that China will react more strongly than it has in the past. Most of the nations involved in the crisis will try to bring North Korea back to the Six-Party Talks. But after that, it is unclear what happens next. “Everyone who deals with North Korea recognizes them as a very unstable actor,” Sneider says.

However, some experts say North Korea is acting assertively both in its relationship with China and on the larger world stage. “The North Koreans are developing a much more realist approach to their foreign policy,” Pinkston says. “They’re saying imbalances of power are dangerous and the United States has too much power—so by increasing their own power they’re helping to balance out world stability. It’s neo-realism straight out of an International Relations textbook.”

The China-North Korea Relationship
Esther Pan, Staff Writer

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ROK suspends aid until missle issue resolved

Saturday, July 8th, 2006

From the Joong Ang Daily:

Flows of aid to stop until crisis abates
South willing to meet North only on missiles, weapons
July 08, 2006

A senior government official said that Seoul would withhold promised aid to the North until the missile crisis is over. That decision did not include a delay in the provision of the last promised fertilizer shipment to North Korea, however; a ship left port yesterday bound for North Korea with the last 20,000 tons of that assistance.

Although the Unification Ministry said that it would not cancel the ministerial talks, which are to be held in Busan from Tuesday through Friday, there is no guarantee that they will actually be held. A former senior ministry official noted that Pyongyang could well boycott the talks themselves in a tit-for-tat response to Seoul’s rejection of working-level military talks it proposed two days before it launched seven missiles on Wednesday. In response to those launches, Korean conservatives have also publicly burned the North Korean flag, another sore point with Pyongyang.

The additional promised 100,000 tons of fertilizer and 500,000 tons of rice aid would not be sent to the North. “We made public what we want to address at this meeting so that the North will hear it,” he said. Echoing the former official’s comments, he added, “It is difficult to say whether the North will actually come.”

While Seoul was pondering how to respond to the missile launches, Pyongyang warned against retaliatory sanctions. Kyodo News Agency reported yesterday that Song Il-ho, the North’s representative for normalization talks with Japan, demanded that Japanese sanctions imposed after the missile tests be lifted. From Yonhap:

North Korea warned on Saturday that Japan could face “stronger physical measures” after it banned a Pyongyang ferry from entering its ports for six months in response to the communist state test-firing seven missiles last week.

Song Il-ho, North Korea’s ambassador in charge of normalizing diplomatic ties with Japan, told a pro-Pyongyang newspaper in Japan that, “If anyone tries to put us under pressure, we will have no choice but to take stronger physical measures.”

Regarding the sudden ban on the North Korean ferry Mangyeongbong 92, he said, “Such (an) anti-humanitarian measure is causing a significant anti-Japanese sentiment among our people,” Song was quoted as saying by the Chosun Sinbo.

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Missle prompts Japan to tighten trade with DPRK

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

Washington Post
Colum Lynch and Anthony Faiola
7/06/06

Japan imposed limited economic sanctions on the North, including a measure prohibiting its officials, ship crews and chartered flights from entering Japan.

A draft U.N. resolution, formally introduced by Japan, would also require states to prevent the transfer of money, material or technology that could “contribute” to Pyongyang’s ballistic missile program or advance its capacity to develop nuclear explosives or other weapons of mass destruction.

In addition, Japanese officials indicated they might be prepared to halt millions of dollars in remittances that are sent annually to North Korea from Koreans living in Japan.

As for China’s response:

Several observers warned that even if Beijing agreed to some form of censure, it would remain reluctant to impose tough economic sanctions out of fear that such measures could destabilize North Korea and spark a crisis on their shared border.

“I don’t think China will take at this moment stronger political or economic action against North Korea,” said Chu Shulong, a political science professor at Tsinghua University and expert in international security. “We Chinese believe basically, fundamentally it is not our problem, the missile launch problem. It’s a problem between North Korea and the U.S., it’s a problem between the DPRK and Japan, it might be a problem between North Korea and South Korea. But basically it’s not a China problem.”

North Korea experts said the options for the Bush administration remain limited, particularly if the Chinese and South Koreans were reluctant to impose tough economic sanctions. Instead, many said, it was more likely that Japan and the United States would seek to continue isolating North Korea by slowly tightening economic sanctions.

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Mindan-Chongryon reconciliation unreconciles

Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

from the Korea Times: 

Failure of Reconciliation in Japan
Continuous Efforts Needed to Achieve Mindan-Chongnyon Amity
 
It is regrettable last month’s historic reconciliation agreement between pro-Seoul and pro- Pyongyang Korean residents in Japan has unravelled in less than 40 days. The hugging and handshaking between Ha Byong-ok, leader of the pro- Seoul Korean Residents Union in Japan (Mindan), and So Man-sol, chairman of the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongnyon), at the headquarters of the latter on May 17 was hailed as an end to the long-standing enmity between the two groups.

However, mounting opposition from Mindan’s rank and file has derailed the agreement. Discord among Mindan members was caused by the unilateral move of its leadership in declaring reconciliation with the Chongnyon. In a central committee meeting last Saturday, Ha said “we are virtually in a state of undoing our earlier reconciliation declaration.”

The primary responsibility for the confusion lies with Ha who hastily proceeded with the reconciliation, disregarding the opinions of provincial Mindan organizations. We can’t help but believe Ha’s personal ambition of achieving something as a leader disrupted the long-standing move to reconcile with its rival group. The important fact we have to consider is that reconciliation came at a time when the hostile mood of Japan toward North Korea is reaching a peak in connection with the abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korean agents.

Some of Korean residents belonging to Mindan were alienated from their Japanese friends after the report was released that Mindan reconciled with Chongnyon. Some Japanese are displeased with the reconciliation, asking: “Is Mindan also becoming an enemy to Japanese society?” The leadership failed to read the underlying sentiment of Japanese society and the hostile attitude of Japanese society strengthened opposition among Koreans to reconciliation.

The Korean residents’ groups have been at odds the last 50 years, symbolizing the territorial division of their fatherland. The invisible barriers between people of the two organizations in Japanese society were said to have been stronger than the DMZ dividing South and North Korea. But, we believe the ideological confrontation among the Koreans was a waste of energy for Japan’s largest ethnic group.

Though Korean residents are divided by the organizations with conflicting ideologies, they are living together in Japanese society where a market economy based on democracy has fully blossomed. We believe it is not so difficult for ordinary members of both groups to become friendly. What is important is that a change of attitude by Pyongyang is crucial to expedite reconciliation of both Korean groups in Japan. It is also hoped Korean residents in Japan continue their efforts to achieve ethnic solidarity through reconciliation in days to come.

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