U. N. expert Hugh Griffiths says North Korea has borrowed tactics used during 18th century piracy to evade sanctions and earn millions.
North Korea defied global sanctions to earn nearly $200 million in 2017 from illicit trade in goods like coal, oil and arms, in part by borrowing tactics from the golden age of piracy, says the leader of a UN panel of experts that issued a report on North Korea Friday.
According to the report, despite four new sets of UN sanctions in 2017, the isolated nation has continued to earn hard currency through increasingly evasive shipping practices, like transferring petroleum from ship to ship at sea, manipulating locator signals, and changing vessel identifiers in the middle of a journey.
“It’s a bit like the pirates of the 18th century,” said Hugh Griffiths, leader of the UN Panel of Experts on North Korea. “They’re renaming the ships. They’re disguising their nationality. They’re painting false names on the ships to suggest that these ships come from other countries.”
The report says North Korea “is already flouting the most recent resolutions by exploiting global oil supply chains, complicit foreign nationals, offshore company registries, and the international banking system.”
Griffiths told NBC News that sanctions are working, but the North Koreans are also getting smarter.
Last month, the U. S. Treasury Dept. published a sanctions advisory outlining the types of deceptive shipping practices North Korea employs and a list of the 24 tankers capable of executing ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum and other banned items. A number of those tankers feature in the new UN report.
In December, a tanker flying the Sierra Leone flag lingered in the East China Sea alongside a North Korean tanker called the Chon Ma San for an illegal ship-to-ship transfer of petroleum products. To avoid detection, the Chon Ma San’s North Korean flag was painted over and the 3’s in its international identification number changed to 8’s.
This January, a ship-to-ship transfer of petroleum products between the North Korean-flagged tanker Rye Song Gang 1 and the Dominica -flagged Yuk Tung took place at night. The panel said the nighttime transfer shows North Korea “is adapting its evasion tactics.”
Catherine Dill, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, agreed with the panel’s assessment. “Part of the reason we focus on this is because ship-to-ship transfers are so dangerous,” she said. “You have to have the right conditions. If you have rough seas it can be hazardous for the crew.”
The regime also benefited from military cooperation in several countries, including Syria, Myanmar, Eritrea, Sudan, and Tanzania, according to the report.
At least four groups of North Korean weapons technicians visited Syria between April 2016 and March 2017, and a UN member state reported that technicians continue to operate at chemical weapons and missile facilities in the cities of Barzah, Hama, and Adra.
