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U.N., U.S. move to increase pressure on Norks
UNITED NATIONS/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.N. Security Council neared agreement on Wednesday on North Korean firms and individuals to be added to a blacklist for involvement in Pyongyang's nuclear and missile programs, diplomats said.

Japanese Ambassador Yukio Takasu told reporters "we are very close" to agreement on the expanded sanctions list. Diplomats said a council committee that has been discussing the issue for a month was on target to meet a weekend deadline for completing its task and could do so as early as Thursday.

As diplomats put the finishing touches on expanding U.N. sanctions, U.S. officials said they had succeeded in increasing international awareness of methods North Korea uses to disguise its trade in illicit weapons as legal business transactions. "North Korea engages in a variety of deceptive financial practices that are intended to obscure the true nature of their transactions," said a senior Obama administration official.

A U.S. team is traveling to key world capitals to warn governments and banks that North Korean practices make it "virtually impossible to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate business," the official said in Washington.

Firms and governments in China, Hong Kong and other places North Korea does business were taking seriously the U.S. warnings about Pyongyang's practice of using front companies and unusually large cash transactions, he added. The official said the goal was to bring scrutiny and thwart suspicious activities, not to hit all North Korean trade. Humanitarian aid would not be affected.
Shut it all down. All of it. Let the Norks starve, and fill the air frequencies that the Norks use to spread propaganda to their own people with the news that it's all Kimmie's fault.
Arms sales are a vital source of foreign currency for destitute North Korea, with a yearly GDP of about $17 billion and a broken economy that produces few other items it can export. The U.S.-based Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis estimates North Korea earns some $1.5 billion a year from missile sales. Other studies said the figure may be in the hundreds of millions of dollars and prior sanctions have cut into exports.

North Korea's annual legitimate trade is estimated at about $3.8 billion, with China being its largest partner with exchanges of about $2.8 billion a year. Previous U.N. sanctions have not dented trade. Beijing has been reluctant to cut trade, a lifeline to its impoverished neighbor, fearing it could cause a collapse of the North's government and lead to chaos on its border.
And because it likes its poodle. To get China to cut off trade and assistance you have to prod the Norks to do things China doesn't like.
This week's blacklisting is expected to go further by specifying individuals and goods to be subject to sanctions, as well as additional companies. The measure would prohibit companies and nations from doing business with the named firms and require them to freeze assets and impose travel bans on the individuals.

The steps described by the U.S. official were in addition to the U.N. measures and targeted counterfeiting, narcotics trafficking and other North Korean activities in addition to illicit weapons proliferation, officials said. "There's a broad consensus, including by China, that this is the right way to go and I don't think the Chinese would take this stuff lightly," said a second U.S. official.

The official said there was a growing international consensus that tightening sanctions on North Korean entities is "the best chance we have to influence their calculations."

"We're confident of an outcome which will be commensurate with DPRK (North Korea) actions and will be effective and will significantly improve the (sanctions) regime," said one Western diplomat.
Posted by: Steve White 2009-07-21
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=274780