Democratic Korea rejects illegal UN sanctions!

By our Asia Affairs correspondent

US imperialism has steam-rollered through a set of economic sanctions against Democratic Korea, putting a cap on the amount of fuel it can buy and further restricting import of crude oil. It also banned textile trade with north Korea, targeting the second biggest export of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

All 15 members of the UN Security Council, including Russia and People’s China, approved the American-inspired resolution that was a dramatically scaled-down version of the first draft which called for an international freeze on all DPRK assets held abroad, and a ban on oil and most other imports to the DPRK apart from essential foods and medicines, which would be enforced by ‘stop and search’ imperialist warships on the high seas.

Some give China credit for scaling down the original draconian demands of US imperialism and its lackeys, but others suggest that the first draft was specifically written precisely to provide the Americans with bargaining lee-way with the Russians and Chinese to get unanimity on the Security Council.

The American imperialists are also threatening to impose sanctions on Russia and China, north Korea’s major trading partners, if they do not impose the anti-DPRK sanctions regime to the letter, whilst continuing to warn of more to come if the people’s government does not unilaterally abandon its nuclear deterrent.

Russian academician Georgi Toloraya thinks that this is nonsense. The Director of the Centre for Russian Strategy in Asia in Moscow said that the US position, which expects Russia to support sanctions against north Korea whilst at the same time sanctioning Russia, is “absurd.”

“The Americans want to deprive the north Koreans of heat, to expel all their guest workers who are needed by Russia in the Far East, and also to stop the export of textiles from the DPRK. What does that have to do with the nuclear missile programme?” Toloraya said.

But Democratic Korea’s ambassador to the Russian Federation says that no sanctions will make his country change its policies and that the DPRK’s nuclear deterrent was needed to deter the hostile policy of the United States and prevent nuclear war.

“We have lived under US sanctions for decades, under the harshest of sanctions,” Kim Yong Jae said. “But we have acquired everything we wanted to. If the US hopes that our position would be shaken and changed, that is an illusion,” he told the Russian media.

“The sanctions resolution of the UN Security Council has been forced by the US, which uses the council as a tool, and is illegal. We fully reject and strongly condemn this resolution,” Ambassador Kim said.

“Instead of acknowledging the reality and making the right choice, the US is using our most justified measures of self-defence to try and strangle our country,” he said.