North Korea making millions from construction projects in Africa – By Jane Onyanga-Omara (usatoday.com) / Oct 23 2017
North Korea is making tens of millions of dollars from construction projects in a number of African countries that are members of the United Nations, a U.N. official has told CNN.
Hugh Griffiths, the coordinator of the U.N. Panel of Experts on North Korea, which monitors the enforcement of sanctions on the reclusive nation, told CNN that the money Pyongyang is making is “highly significant.”
The North Korean state-owned entity Mansudae is carrying out many of the contracts, CNN reported. The countries where construction projects have taken place include Namibia, Botswana, Angola, Zimbabwe and Senegal, according to the broadcaster.
“We are looking at at least 14 African (U.N.) member states where Mansudae alone was running quite large construction operations — building everything from ammunition factories, to presidential palaces, to apartment blocks,” Griffiths told CNN.
“North Koreans can make a little money go a long way,” he added.
In Namibia, Mansudae built the presidential palace and a statue of Sam Nujoma, the anti-apartheid activist and the nation’s founding president, in front of the National Museum in the capital of Windhoek, according to CNN.
Namibia’s Deputy Prime Minister Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah told CNN that all North Korean operations have now been stopped and all North Korean construction workers have left the nation, in accordance with U.N. sanctions.
“All of these were agreed before the sanctions by the U.N. But when the sanctions were imposed we had to comply and then we had to cease all the contracts, we had to terminate the contracts we had with North Korea,” Nandi-Ndaitwah told the broadcaster.
The U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions on Mansudae’s statue-building operations last year and on the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation (KOMID), which CNN says Mansudae worked with in Namibia, in 2009.
The report came as tensions remain high over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile program, and North Korean leader Kim John Un and President Trump have engaged in a war of words. Since July, North Korea has conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test, launched missiles over Japan and test-launched two intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Japan’s Defense Minister Itsunori Odonera said Monday that the threat from Pyongyang has grown to an “unprecedented, critical and imminent” level.
He made the comments at the start of a meeting in the Philippines with U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and South Korea’s Defense Minister Song Young-moo.
“The country has steadfastly improved it nuclear and missiles capability… we have to take calibrated and different responses to meet that level of threat,” Odonera said, without elaborating.
Mattis criticized North Korea for defying U.N. Security Council resolutions and emphasized a unified position between the allies to pressurize Pyongyang to give up its nuclear program, the AP reported.
Meanwhile, in an open letter to several parliaments that emerged last week, North Korea said it was a “full-fledged nuclear power,” and that Trump was “trying to drive the world into a horrible nuclear disaster.”
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told local media that she received the “unprecedented” open letter, which was dated Sept. 28, from Australia’s Indonesian embassy via North Korea’s embassy in Jakarta.
It urges parliaments that want peace to “discharge their due mission and duty in realising the desire of mankind for international justice and peace with sharp vigilance against the heinous and reckless moves of the Trump administration.”
“This is the first letter that we can find that any Australian foreign minister has received from North Korea…it’s an open letter, this is not how they usually send messages around the world,” Bishop said, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
PB/TK – North Korea seems to have lots of free labor for African nations to use while their boys and men fight decades long wars. And yet the US only has 1000 soldiers covering operations across a continent.
