WASHINGTON - Illegal activities such as drug smuggling provide critical funding for North Korea’s regime and its military programs. But as international sanctions strangle North Korea’s economic resources, the Pyongyang regime appears to have diversified.
A research report released in September found that more than half of the rhino horn smuggling cases uncovered in Africa in the past 30 years involved North Korean diplomats and that African countries have been reluctant to take tough measures against them even though rhinos are under siege from poachers.
According to , rhino deaths in Africa may soon outpace births. In 2014, more than 1,200 rhinos were killed in South Africa alone, a 9,000 percent increase since 2007.
South African researcher and journalist Julian Rademeyer, who wrote , shares with his findings on North Korea’s rarely mentioned illegal trade, . His remarks have been edited for clarity and length.
?
An analysis that we conducted looking into cases of diplomats involved in smuggling rhino horns and ivory out of Africa over the past 30 years found that North Korean diplomats or diplomatic passport holders were involved in 18 of the 29 cases that we discovered. It was quite a surprising number.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were reports that North Korean diplomats were very much involved in smuggling rhino horn and ivory, particularly out of Zimbabwe. It was believed that that had faded away or disappeared. But in the last few years, starting in 2015, we’ve had a number of cases where North Korean diplomats — in some cases senior diplomats — have been detained or stopped or found with rhino horn and consignments of ivory.
Many African countries have fairly long-standing ties with North Korea. North Korea currently has embassies in around 10 African states, and many of those countries are reluctant to take action when incidents like this occur, and they tend to, in many cases, turn a blind eye. As a country, North Korea championed many African states … during the liberation conflict that occurred within Africa. If you talk to government officials in a number of those countries, there’s a degree of loyalty to North Korea because of the support for the liberation movements they got from Pyongyang in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
?
One of our concerns is that as tensions ratchet up, as sanctions against North Korea become more stringent, as North Korea’s lifeline, its ability to bring in money from more legitimate sources, is cut back and hemmed in, there is a very real danger that some of these activities could expand, because they need money from somewhere. And certainly their reliance on illicit funds or dark money could grow, and we could see instances like these increasing — the criminal activity that’s been documented over the years — increasing.
In May 2015 in Mozambique, Mozambican police detained two men in the country’s capital, Maputo. One of them was a senior diplomat based in the North Korean Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa. The other was a taekwondo master who was later alleged to have been a North Korean spy. The two men were stopped in a vehicle that had 4.5 kilograms of rhino horn and around $100,000 in cash, but they were released and returned to South Africa. The taekwondo master left for Pyongyang a short while later, and the diplomat was ultimately asked to leave South Africa around December 2015.
In September and October of last year, in two separate cases, North Korea nationals traveling on diplomatic passports were stopped in a Berlin international airport. One was found in possession of around 76 pieces of worked ivory, and the other was found with around 200 bangles made from ivory. We know that in one case, the diplomat in question, believed to be the trade attaché working out of Zimbabwe for the North Korean government, identified himself as a diplomat who was released without charge.
?
[It involves] one of North Korea’s most prominent diplomats today, Han Tae Song, [who] is the head of the permanent mission to the United Nations in Geneva for the country and serves as the ambassador to Switzerland. In 1992, in a diplomatic bag. At the time, the country’s state-run newspaper reported that the government filed its own course of action, [which] was to deport him as an undesirable character whose activities are incompatible with the status accredited to diplomats.