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Audit agency questions lax monitoring of Nork trade
SEOUL, May 13 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's audit agency expressed concern Wednesday that materials used to develop weapons of mass destruction may enter North Korea due to Seoul's lax monitoring and advised the Unification Ministry to tighten rules. The ministry, in charge of overseeing personnel and equipment exchanges with North Korea, should consider the "special nature of inter-Korean relations" and give censoring priority to strategic materials over general trade items, the Board of Audit and Inspection said in a report.
Strategic materials refer to equipment or technology used to make nuclear or biological weapons or missiles that are prohibited from being carried into the North. Such materials or items that may fall into that category are sometimes overlooked as the ministry's checklist, generally used by the tax agency and other government agencies, is too broad, it said. The ministry failed to spot and investigate packages of black powder, an explosive mixture of sulfur, that were transported into North Korea by a local firm last year, the agency said, though it could not say whether black powder is a strategic material. The audit agency also found that 270 used computers were exported to North Korea in a possible violation of the law. The computers were initially destined for China, but their owner changed the destination to North Korea without informing the government, it said. Other computers that were subject to return to the South were not brought back in time, it noted. South Korean law allows citizens to bring computers to North Korea on condition that they bring them back within a year. The ministry failed to keep track of more than 2,000 computers taken to a joint industrial complex in the North's border town of Kaesong over the past year by South Korean workers, it said. The Unification Ministry said in a statement that some of the items noted by the customs agency were not strategic materials, but added it will "prepare a manual to effectively control" such items. Inter-Korean trade volume reached US$1.82 billion last year, the audit agency said. More than 186,000 South Koreans, not counting over 303,000 who toured North Korean resorts, visited North Korea for business and aid projects during the period, up 18 percent from the previous year, it said. Posted by: Steve White 2009-05-16 |
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