TOKYO – South Korea Tuesday unleashed a wave of direct sanctions against North Korea, blacklisting dozens of Northern companies and people for the first time and banning ships that have visited North Korean ports from its waters.
The sanctions, which overlap with current measures imposed by the United States and the United Nations, nevertheless signal President Park Geun-hye’s intent to inflict as much pain as possible on Pyongyang in the wake of its recent defiance.
“North Korea’s provocations – its nuclear tests and long-range missiles – can no longer be accepted and North Korea’s misjudgments should be corrected by making them pay the heavy price for their actions,” Lee Suk-joon, minister of government policy coordination, told reporters Tuesday.
“Today’s announcement expresses the international community’s firm intention to change North Korea,” he said.
Kim Jong Un ordered a nuclear test in January – which Pyongyang claimed was a hydrogen bomb – then last month he oversaw the launch of a long-range rocket thought to be part of a ballistic missile program. The United Nations responded by introducing tough new sanctions against the North’s regime.
The South Korean sanctions designate 30 companies with links to the North’s nuclear and missile programs, as well as 38 North Korean individuals and two foreigners. The foreigners are Leonard Lai, president of Singapore-based Senat Shipping, and Lyou Jen-yi, the Taiwanese president of Royal Team Corporation.
All will be banned from the South Korean financial system and any assets they have in the South will be frozen. This is the first time that South Korea has specifically targeted people and companies by name, a practice used by the U.N., U.S., and the European Union.
Seoul also said that it would ban ships that have been to North Korea within the previous 180 days from its waters, and will introduce stronger controls on imports to and exports from North Korea. The U.N. sanctions mandate cargo inspections for all goods going in and out of North Korea by land, sea or air, and one North Korean ship has already been impounded in the Philippines.
The South Korean government renewed its advisory that South Koreans traveling abroad should not visit North Korean restaurants, which are a significant source of income for the regime in Pyongyang. The kitschy restaurants, which feature North Korean women singing and playing instruments, are located in cities in China and south-east Asia and are a popular destination for South Korean tourists who otherwise have no contact with their estranged compatriots.
Separately, Seoul informed Moscow Tuesday that it would suspend its end of a logistics project that connected the Russian port of Khasan and the North Korean port of Rajin with ports in South Korea. Resumption of this project could be discussed if there was progress in denuclearization talks with North Korea, said Lee of the government policy office.
South Korea already had some sanctions in place against North Korea as punishment for the 2010 torpedoing of a South Korean naval corvette, which killed 48 Southern sailors. But the new measures represent a sharp escalation in the South Korean government’s approach to its errant neighbor to the north.
Park has cast aside her “trustpolitik” approach to North Korea – a mixture of carrots and sticks — and is instead using only the latter. Last month she ordered the shutdown of the inter-Korean industrial zone at Kaesong on the northern side of the demilitarized zone that separates the two countries, a step not taken even during the 2010 naval clash.
In a speech last month, Park said that North Korea’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons program “will only hasten its collapse.”
