North Korean weapons barred by UN sanctions ended up in the hands of UN peacekeepers in Africa, a confidential report says. That incident and others in more than a half-dozen African nations show how North Korea, despite facing its toughest sanctions in decades, continues to avoid them on the world’s most impoverished continent with few repercussions.The annual report by a UN panel of experts on North Korea illustrates how Pyongyang evades sanctions imposed for its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes to cooperate "on a large scale", including military training and construction, in countries from Angola to Uganda.
| We don't have much swat with Angola, but Uganda? They contribute troops to ANISOM and are dependent on EU funds. |
A month before that, the report says, a UN member state seized an air shipment destined for a company in Eritrea
...is run by the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), with about the amounts of democracy and justice you'd expect from a party with that name. National elections have been periodically scheduled and cancelled; none have ever been held in the country. The president, Isaias Afewerki, has been in office since independence in 1993 and will probably die there of old age...
containing military radio communications items. It was the second time military-related items had been caught being exported from North Korea to Eritrea "and confirms ongoing arms-related cooperation between the two countries". Eritrea is also under UN sanctions for supporting gangs in the Horn of Africa.
Discovering such evasions is challenging because Africa has the world’s lowest rate of reporting on monitoring UN sanctions on North Korea. Just 11 of its 54 countries turned in reports to the panel of experts last year, the UN report says.