South Korean Government Exploring Ways to Circumvent UN Sanctions on North Korea
It looks like the Moon administration has found another way to evade UN sanctions on North Korea, paying to use North Korea’s ski resort and restarting Mt. Geumgang Tours:
While the Koreas will discuss further details through document exchanges at Panmunjeom, there are several aspects of the plans that may clash with the sanctions placed on Pyongyang.
U.N. Security Council sanctions ban the direct provision of cash to North Korea, but South Korean skiers may have to pay to use the ski resort for training.
Meanwhile, tours to Mount Geumgang, which began in 1998, have been suspended since 2008 when a South Korean tourist was shot dead by the North Korean military there due to a violation of tourist zone regulations.
Hosting a joint-cultural event may signal that the Koreas are open to the idea of resuming tours to the North’s scenic mountain, despite the sanctions.
Furthering the dispute is the fact that the South first proposed these plans to the North, which could send a message that Seoul is not complying with the international community’s hard-line stance toward Pyongyang over its nuclear program.
“We proposed these plans to the North in the high-level talks on Jan. 9,” Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung said in a briefing Wednesday. [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but this was all very predictable considering President Moon is a big believer in the failed Sunshine Policy. The original Sunshine Policy was bought and paid for initially with a huge $500 million bribe to the Kim regime. Follow on bribes described as humanitarian and economic aid continued under the Sunshine Policy. The aid would total to about a $1 billion a year. To put this into context the South Koreans were paying more money to the Kim regime annually then what they were contributing to the US-ROK alliance. The election of the conservative President Lee Myung-Bak changed this dynamic.
The current liberal Moon administration wants to go back to the days of paying off the Kim regime under the Sunshine Policy and the current talks over Winter Olympic participation is just the start.
The leftist government of South Korea are complete fools.
Come on up Bitcoin!
The UN needs to slap sanctions on South Korea too.
This is easy to deal with.
Hyundai, Samsung, etc…
…no imports into America, cut off from the banking system, assets in America confiscated…
Oh… rather do business with the world than North Korea? No problem… pay a 500 million dollar “reinstatement fee” to the American Department of Defense and everyone forgets this ever happened.
Say, China, how are things going with you?
I’m thinking South Koreans are not really clear on what Communism really means.
If South Korea violates UN sanctions US needs to remove all their forces from the pen. Obvious South Korea doesn’t want our help.
Flyingsword, one has to remember how they rreated Yi Sun-sin. Korean culture has moments of greatness and moments of lunacy.
I don’t think many South Koreans are willing to totally condemn their “brothers” in the North. Both sides espouse a fairly blinkered nationalism at times, so the ideological content of communism (which has never been very big in the North anyway) is nothing compared to the nationalism. But I agreed with others, that Moon is either a fool, or he has some kind of longer game in mind. Personally, I lean more to the former than the latter, so long as we keep in mind that anyone can be a fool in one direction and still be brilliant in another. The question is whether Moon will be re-elected, and thus have a longer policy tenure, or whether in the next go-around, his base will be eroded somewhat.