EU Referendum

Showing posts with label North Korea. Show all posts

Camp+16[i-Camp+16]Why are we so obsessed with North Korea some of our readers must be asking. After all, it is not about to enter the European Union.

There are, of course those stories of the UN money being effectively handed over to Kim Jong-il and UN money is our tax money. Every penny that goes to North Korea is a penny more for one of the worst totalitarian tyrants in the modern world and I, for one, object to my money making his life easier.

Over and above that there is the question of freedom, which is indivisible. People in North Korea cannot do what we do, cannot speak their opinions, cannot blog, cannot read websites. They need our support even if they do not know we exist.

Therefore, it is of great interest to read on One Free Korea, courtesy of Gateway Pundit, the following story:

Sources residing in the district of Chongjin, North Hamkyung informed on the 1st and 5th “On December 20th, a mass group of 120 prisoners from the camp in Hwasung escaped and so the National Safety Agency and the People’s Protection Agency are in a state of emergency” and said “Lately, additional checkpoints have been established at various locations in North Hamkyung inspecting permits for both vehicle and personal travel.”

This is the first such story to come out of that hell-hole in twenty years.

The map above shows the position of Camp 16. It is a long way from China, it is a long way from anywhere. If these people managed to escape and stay escaped then, as One Free Korea says, they must have had help. Is there really an organized underground network in that country?

Kim+Albright[i-Kim+Albright]To give the new SecGen of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, his due, he seems at first to have responded reasonably well to the latest UN scandal, the money passed on to North Korea'’s Kim Jong-il by the United Nations Development Programme without a great deal of supervision.

I wish I could say that it was this blog that did the trick but, I suspect, it was the probability of a prolonged campaign by the Wall Street Journal that encouraged Mr Ban to pronounce on the subject.

A week ago on Friday Mr Ban’s spokesman announced that the SecGen had met with Ad Melkert, associate administrator of the UNDP (what is he associated with, one wonders) and added:

The Secretary-General will call for an urgent, system wide and external inquiry into all activities done around the globe by the U.N. funds and programmes.

The key word, as the following Monday’s WSJ editorial pointed out, is “external”. We all remember how long it took the previous SecGen, Kofi Annan (father of Kojo and brother of Kobina) to set up the independent Volcker Commission to find out what has been going on in the Oil for Food scam. Admittedly he picked a man whom he had considered to be “reliable” to chair it but, alas, the report was not quite what SecGen Annan had wanted.

The UNDP announced in a letter, published in Monday’s WSJ, that it welcomes “an independent and external audit of our operations in North Korea”. In the same letter, readers were assured that

If the member states of the U.N. and UNDP’s board were to decide that our presence there were no longer useful, we would leave immediately.

Brave words. Unfortunately, one of the members of that board is North Korea itself (it also sits on the board of UNDP’s affiliate, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and if UNICEF as well as being a member of the UN Disarmament Conference. What are the chances of Kim Jong-il’s henchmen (for who else would be sent to negotiate on these august boards) agreeing that the UNDP and its hard cash were no longer wanted in North Korea? One of the many tales of porcine aviation that the UN is so fond of regaling us with.

Meanwhile, the UNDP is twisting and turning. In a press conference last Friday the same Ad Melkert dismissed the problem with the words:

We’re not talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. … Over a period of 10 years it is, of course, tens of millions.

Oh well, that’s all right then. Actually, the sum is $27.7 million and, indeed, it is chickenfeed compared to the Oil for Food scam.

There is a long piece on North Korea, the UN and various ramifications of the problem, both nuclear and humanitarian, here.

COMMENT THREAD

Kim+Albright[i-Kim+Albright]Another day, another UN scandal. This one is in its early stages. Well, no, the scandal has been going on for some time but its uncovery is in its early stages that are, as the Wall Street Journal points out, very reminiscent of the beginnings of what we have learnt to call the oil-for-food scam.

One lesson of Oil for Food, and its failure to lead to any serious reform, is that to some foreign policy elites there can be no such thing as a U.N. "scandal." That's because for them the U.N. is all about good intentions, and the hopes and dreams for peace, rather than about actual results. But it is precisely that forbearance that has allowed too many dictators to exploit the U.N. for their own purposes, and has brought Turtle Bay to its current low ebb. Getting to the bottom of Cash for Kim is one more chance to make the U.N. shape up, and to stop financing a global menace in the bargain.

Melanie Kirkpatrick gives some of the gruesome details in an article that is worth reading right through.

American officials have been pushing for some time for greater transparency in the activity, particularly the financial activity of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in North Korea. I am sure none of our readers will be too surprised at being told that the UNDP has been stonewalling.

In a Jan. 16 letter to UNDP Associate Administrator Ad Melkert, Ambassador Mark Wallace of the U.S. Mission to the U.N. lays out what American digging has found so far: The UNDP's program in the Democratic People's Republic "has for years operated in blatant violation of U.N. rules, served as a steady and large source of hard currency and other resources for the DPRK government with minimal or no assurance that UNDP funds and resources are utilized for legitimate development activities."

So what sort of sums are we talking about? Hard to tell, according to Ms Kirkpatrick:

While the precise amount of hard currency supplied through UNDP isn't known, the documents suggest it has run at least to the tens of millions of dollars since 1998 and one source says it could be upward of $100 million. An internal 1999 audit notes a budget of $27.9 million for 29 projects. David Morrison, a UNDP spokesman, says "the overall size of the program" in North Korea has been reduced in recent years. While $22.2 million was budgeted for 2005-2006, the agency spent only $3.2 million last year and $2.1 million in 2005, he says. Programs fall into four areas: humanitarian assistance, public health, environment and agriculture, and the economy.

Do we know at least what the money has gone on? Well, not really, as UN inspectors are not exactly welcome in North Korea.

A defense that the UNDP merely does humanitarian work--for the people of North Korea and not the government--isn't credible given the details exposed by Ms. Kirkpatrick. U.N. officials can't even say with confidence that all of the "development" projects exist because they haven't been allowed to visit their sites. Pyongyang officials insist on payments in cash that become fungible hard currency for the regime. Every U.N. dollar is one more that Kim doesn't have to raise from other (and often illegal) sources to pay off his generals or to buy a nuclear centrifuge.

In other words, the usual messy situation has developed under cover of which hard cash is handed over to a very nasty dictator to be used as he sees fit.

There is, Ms Kirpatrick emphasises, to date no evidence that any UN official has been taking bribes or behaving in an openly corrupt fashion. Of course, one cannot rule that possibility out but neither is it essential for our understanding of how Kim Jong-Il benefits from western “generosity” and the UN’s inability to live up to its own supposed principles.

It seems that the UNDP staff in Pyongyang consists almost entirely of North Koreans, all appointed by the government, whose salaries are not paid to them directly but through that very government. How much of it reaches the actual officials is unknown just as it is unknown what proportion of the funding reaches the people in need of help, that is most of North Korea’s population.

But who needs a checkbook? According to the same audit, cash is the only means of payment that the government accepts. The UNDP does not use purchase orders in North Korea and local purchases--including those over $1,000--are made in cash. That includes local office costs, which are typically provided in kind by the host country. North Korea even charges rent, to the tune of $2 million a year, according to one source who has looked at the program.

Meanwhile, there is little if any oversight of the UNDP's projects in North Korea, which, according to a U.N. document, numbered 30 last year. UNDP regulations require one official, on-site visit a year but since Pyongyang prohibits foreigners from visiting some of the project sites, that's another rule that's out the window. Audits of individual projects are spotty at best and in the case of "nationally executed" or "NEX" projects--that is, those run by the North Korean government with funds provided by the UNDP--they are often done by the government itself, giving new meaning to the adage about the fox running the henhouse.

Does the new SecGen Ban Ki-moon watch Laurel and Hardy films, I wonder. If he does he could quote Ollie Hardy's line to his predecessor Kofi Annan: "That's another fine mess you got me into."

COMMENT THREAD