WASHINGTON: The Obama administration announced Wednesday that it was imposing sanctions on North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, personally, blacklisting the unpredictable ruler and top officials in his reclusive government for human rights abuses as he aggressively presses forward with his nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.
The State Department took the unusual step of naming Kim and 14 other senior officials it said were responsible for grave human rights abuses in a five-page report detailing repression in North Korea. The report singled out top figures inside its intelligence and security ministries, which the department said had engaged in practices including extrajudicial killings, forced labour and torture.
The Treasury Department, imposing its first human rights sanctions on any North Korean official, designated them on a list of people whose assets are frozen and who are barred from transactions with any US citizen.
The actions were mandated by Congress as part of a law enacted in February that required the administration to report on human rights abuses in North Korea and to impose sanctions on anyone found to be responsible. But senior administration officials said they had long planned to take more aggressive action that would move human rights violations — until now on the periphery of the United States’ efforts to isolate and punish North Korea for its bad behaviour — to a more central position in the administration’s strategy. That involved a painstaking, monthlong process of identifying the officials inside North Korea’s secretive system who were the worst offenders.
“The report represents the most comprehensive US government effort to date to name those responsible for or associated with the worst aspects of the North Korean government’s repression, including serious human rights abuses and censorship in the DPRK, and we will continue to identify more individuals and entities in future reports,” John Kirby, the State Department spokesman, said in a statement accompanying the report. DPRK is an abbreviation for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, another name for North Korea.
The new sanctions are the latest evidence that President Barack Obama is determined to heighten the repercussions North Korea would face for its provocative actions, after the country conducted its fourth nuclear test in January. In March, the Obama administration pressed for and won stringent new economic sanctions at the United Nations. Last month it sought to further choke off North Korea’s access to the world financial system by designating the country a “primary” money launderer.
The decision to target Kim comes a few weeks after Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, said he would meet with the North Korean dictator to discuss his nation’s nuclear program.
Victor Cha, the Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the human rights sanctions announced on Wednesday reflected an escalation by Obama intended to force North Korea to rejoin talks to rein in its nuclear program should Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, win the election.
“They basically made a decision that their best chance at ever getting a negotiation going with North Korea would be to basically follow the Iran template, which was to put as much pressure as they could on the regime with the hope that they would ultimately have to go back to the talks,” Cha said.
In the short term, he added, the sanctions could have the opposite effect, prompting North Korea — which has behaved erratically ahead of US elections and during August, when the United States and South Korea have military exercises — to lash out further.
“In August and September, we’re going to see a lot of belligerent activity by North Korea,” Cha said. “Remember how they reacted to the movie ‘The Interview’? That’s just fiction; this is real life, and they may react very negatively to the designating of basically their god.”
The movie, which depicted the assassination of Kim, prompted North Korea to hack the computers at Sony Entertainment, which made the film, and to threaten violence against theatres.
Senior Obama administration officials said Wednesday that while the new human rights sanctions were proceeding on a separate track from those related to North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, ultimately the two sets of actions should be mutually reinforcing.
“There are those who will feel that this will make the task of negotiating that much more difficult, but the reality is that Kim Jong Un has shown no propensity and no willingness to pursue a negotiated solution,” said Christopher R. Hill, who was assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2005 to 2009, heading the US delegation to diplomatic talks on North Korea’s nuclear program. “It’s a kind of well-deserved punishment. To some extent, it’s a gesture on our part to signal our extreme displeasure with the guy.”
— New York Times News Service
