Then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, right, shakes hands with North Korean envoy Jo Myong-Rok before the start of meetings October 11, 2000, at the Harry S. Truman State Department in Washington. Days later, Albright became the highest-level U.S. official to visit Pyongyang in half a century and met with then-supreme leader Kim Jong Il, the late father of current head Kim Jong Un, in an effort to end hostilities. MANNY CENETA/AFP/Getty Images
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The United Nations Security Council is due to vote on Friday on a U.S.-drafted resolution that seeks to toughen sanctions on North Korea in response to its latest intercontinental ballistic missile launch, diplomats said.
The draft, seen by Reuters on Thursday, seeks to ban nearly 90 percent of refined petroleum product exports to North Korea by capping them at 500,000 barrels a year and demand the repatriation of North Koreans working abroad within 12 months.
It would also cap crude oil supplies to North Korea at 4 million barrels a year. The United States has been calling on China to limit its oil supply to its neighbor and ally.
The text was circulated to the 15-member council on Thursday. While it was not immediately clear how China would vote, traditionally a draft on North Korea is not given to all members until it is agreed by Beijing and Washington.
The United States has been negotiating with China on the draft resolution for the past week, diplomats said. If adopted, it would be the 10th resolution imposing new sanctions on North Korea over its missile and nuclear programs since 2006.
To pass, a resolution needs at least nine votes in favor and no vetoes by the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.
The United States late last month warned North Korea’s leadership it would be “utterly destroyed” if war were to break out after Pyongyang test-fired its most advanced missile, putting the U.S. mainland within range.
During a speech on Thursday, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “stressed that nobody can deny the entity of the DPRK which rapidly emerged as a strategic state capable of posing a substantial nuclear threat to the U.S.,” according to North Korea’s official KCNA news agency.
DPRK is the acronym for the country’s official name, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
U.N. political affairs chief Jeffrey Feltman visited Pyongyang earlier this month – the first senior U.N. official to do so since 2011 – and said North Korean officials did not commit to talks, but he believes he left “the door ajar.”
The U.S.-drafted resolution repeats previous language by reaffirming the council’s “support for the Six Party Talks, calls for their resumption.” So-called six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program stalled in 2008.
In a bid to further choke North Korea’s external sources of funding, the draft resolution also seeks to ban North Korean exports of food products, machinery, electrical equipment, earth and stone, including magnesite and magnesia; wood; and vessels.
It would ban exports to North Korea of industrial equipment, machinery, transportation vehicles, and industrial metals.
The draft resolution would subject 19 new North Koreans and the Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces to a global asset freeze and travel ban.
It also seeks to allow countries to seize, inspect and freeze any vessel in their ports or territorial waters that they believe was carrying banned cargo or involved in prohibited activities.
Separately, China and Russia on Thursday asked for more time to consider a U.S. proposal to blacklist 10 ships for transporting banned items from North Korea, diplomats said. It was unclear how much more time would be given.
The vessels are accused of “conducting illegal ship-to-ship transfers of refined petroleum products to North Korean vessels or illegally transporting North Korean coal to other countries for exports,” the United States said in its proposal.
Countries are required to ban blacklisted ships from entering their ports. The council’s North Korea sanctions committee in October designated four ships as banned for carrying coal from North Korea.
By Michelle Nichols, Reuters (Editing by Jonathan Oatis and James Dalgleish)
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From a related news from the Newsweek
North Korea Tells Trump That Kim Jong Un Will Keep His Nuclear Weapons and U.S. Can Blame Obama
By Tom O’Connor, Newsweek
North Korea blasted President Donald Trump’s recent “America First” National Security Strategy, insisting supreme leader Kim Jong Un would keep his nuclear weapons and refuse to bow to U.S. pressure.
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry issued Friday the scathing condemnation of Trump’s debut strategy, saying it was only the latest of a number of U.S. failures to engage the reclusive, communist state that has amassed a powerful nuclear and ballistic weapons arsenal in defiance of U.N. sanctions.
The ministry said that, despite engaging in multilateral talks with the U.S. and other countries for two decades, “the previous U.S. administrations threw all the agreements reached with us into a garbage can like waste paper,” assuming the country would collapse.
Despite Trump’s vow to take a tougher stance than his predecessors, the ministry said, “There is no change at all in the strategic goal of the U.S. to achieve hegemony over the world by means of force.”
“We chose the road of possessing the nuclear weapons to defend our sovereignty and rights to existence and development in the face of ever increased hostile moves and nuclear threats and blackmail of the U.S. We are convinced that the only way to ensuring a lasting peace on the Korean peninsula is to have the deterrence that ensures a practical balance of force with the U.S.,” the ministry wrote, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
“The international society should keep vigilance against the maneuvers of the gang of Trump to invade and control the DPRK with force by igniting a nuclear war at any cost in the Korean peninsula and clearly see through the ulterior motive behind its repeated talk of dialogue, designed to cover up its evil intention and mock the world,” it added, using an acronym for the country’s official name—the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“The gang of Trump likes to pose itself as if its country is a world superpower. However, the U.S. is nothing but a corpse going to the grave.”
The U.S. and North Korea’s history began in the aftermath of World War II when the Korean Peninsula was seized from the Japanese Empire and divided between the Soviet Union and the U.S. Tensions grew between the two satellite states and, in 1950, a bloody, three-year war broke out between the Soviet-backed North, with heavy Chinese support, and the South, supported by the U.S. and U.N. While an armistice was reached in 1953, with little territorial change, the two rivals technically remain at war today.
Since then, there have been no formal relations between Washington and Pyongyang, which found itself firmly on the communist side of the Cold War. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, however, then-President Bill Clinton demanded North Korea allow entry to inspectors of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, who were refused in 1994, a violation of the deal that halted the Korean War.
While carefully balancing escalation and diplomacy, Clinton managed to form the Agreed Framework between the pair, giving heavy oil and light-water reactors to North Korea in exchange for a nuclear freeze, and the Four Party Talks involving Japan and China in 1996.
Diplomacy persisted under the administration of former President George W. Bush, despite him placing North Korea, along with Iraq and Iran, on his “Axis of Evil.”Allegations that North Korea had secretly continued enriching uranium led nations supporting the Clinton-era initiative to supply heavy oil to North Korea to cease shipments in October 2002.
In response, North Korea withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, expelling international monitors and kickstarting nuclear production in early 2003. Later that year, Bush brought North Korea to the table again, along with China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, for the Six-Party Talks.
These talks were the last major dialogue between the U.S. and North Korea to date and, although North Korea committed in 2005 to “abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs,” negotiations began to unravel with dueling accusations of violations to the agreement. North Korea then tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006.
In an effort to restart talks, the U.S. agreed to remove North Korea from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list later that year (Trump returned North Korea to the list last month) and, in 2008, North Korea destroyed one of its cooling towers, used for nuclear production.
North Korea pulled out of the Six-Party Talks months into the administration of former President Barack Obama in April 2009, responding to the U.N.’s condemnation of a failed satellite launch. Obama took a hardline stance, increasing sanctions and ordering cyber attacks against North Korea. When the youngest Kim inherited control of the country from his father in 2011, the millennial leader accelerated military and scientific accomplishments, with 2017 being his most successful year to date.
Despite Trump promising to prevent any North Korea intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launches or nuclear weapon tests, Kim has overseen both within the past few months. Trump slapped the reclusive, militarized state with even more intense sanctions, but North Korea still accomplished its goal of testing a hydrogen bomb more powerful than all five of its previous nuclear tests combined and firing its Hwasong-15 ICBM, which experts say could strike any target in the U.S.
Trump’s recent National Security Strategy branded North Korea a “rogue regime” and accused it of developing chemical and biological weapons, something North Korea has denied. Trump’s strategy hasn’t only irked North Korea, however, it has fueled tensions with China and Russia.
Both China and Russia have censured neighboring North Korea for its nuclear bomb and ballistic missile tests, but they also have warned Trump not to further escalate the situation with heightened U.S. military presence and activity in the Asia-Pacific, where all three world powers maintain overlapping interests.
By Michelle Nichols
This article was first written by Newsweek
The 21st Century
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