by Tzvi Ben Gedalyah Kislev 27, 5770 / December 14, '09 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/134981
(IsraelNN.com) American intelligence officials tipped off Thai authorities who confiscated 35 tons of weapons, including missiles and explosives, probably headed for Iran, which supplies Hizbullah and Hamas. A Russian plane was seized during a refueling stop in Bangkok on Monday.
Five men were arrested but are not cooperating with investigators, according to Australian and British news sources. The cargo included rocket-propelled grenades and surface-to-air missile launchers. The weapons were in 12 tightly-sealed wood and metal crates that were listed as oil-drilling equipment. The United Nations has placed sanctions against North Korea’s arms trading,
Although Pakistan was a possible destination for the weapons, most suspicions were aimed at Iran, which was the destination of a previous shipment impounded in July in the United Arab Emirates. The ship’s cargo contained enough explosive powder for thousands of short-range rockets.
Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva suggested that the arms may have been bound for terrorist organizations.
North Korea has circumvented the United Nations ban and earns approximately $1 billion a year in arms sales.
North Korea Caught Smuggling Weapons: Iran Likeliest Destination (UPDATED)
North Korea, which was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism last year, has been caught — wait for it — smuggling weapons again. The 35 tons of arms were found aboard an Il-76 transport on its way from Pyongyang to points west when the five-person crew requested permission to land at Bangkok to cash their checks from the CIA and head straight for Pattaya refuel:
Lieutenant General Thangai Prasajaksattru, commander of Thailand’s Central Investigation Bureau, confirmed that five men from eastern Europe had been detained, but he did not yet know their nationalities.
“There were a lot of weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), missiles and other war weapons,” he said.
National television channels reported that four of the detained men are from Kazakhstan and one is from Belarus, and said that US officials had tipped off Thai authorities before they found the cache. [AFP]
Officially, the only information we have on the destination is that it was headed for “Asia, probably South Asia,” although one report mentioned Pakistan as a potential destination, which opens up some fascinating possibilities. Iran, also a member of the Axis of Misunderstood Nations, may be a more likely destination. As I’ve previously noted here, the UAE seized a shipment of similar gear in the Persian Gulf last summer on its way to Iran. According to the Washington Post, the weapons were meant for the use of either Hezbollah or Shiite militias in Iraq. Interestingly enough, Iran is a major manufacturer of RPG’s and explosives, meaning the Iranians were buying weapons and deniability, which North Korea is always happy to sell:
The U.N. sanctions and the cut-off of handouts from South Korea have dealt a heavy blow to the North, which has an estimated GDP of $17 billion, and may force it back into nuclear disarmament talks in the hopes of winning aid, analysts said. [Reuters]
But of course, forcing North Korea back to talks is one thing; forcing them to disarm is quite another. Just ask our current Ambassador to Iraq. On his advice, President George W. Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Discuss among yourselves.
You can read more on North Korean weapons sales and proliferation to Iran and Syria here.
Update: The AP is now reporting that the cargo included “explosives, rocket-propelled grenades and components for surface-to-air missiles.”
I suspect we — or at least our government — will soon know exactly where those weapons were headed. I, for one, am keenly interested in just who nearly acquired the ability to take out an airliner. If, as was the case with that container of weapons seized by the UAE, the intended recipients were terrorists, what justifies President Obama’s continuing failure to put North Korea back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism?
The standard response is that such a move would upset our sensitive (and spectacularly ineffective) nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. But if responding to North Korea’s outrages with kid gloves hasn’t worked before, then tolerating proliferation and support for terrorism is neither worth that cost nor demonstrably conducive to effective diplomacy. Since President Obama’s inauguration, North Korea has tested a missile and a nuke, sporadically renounced any intention of disarming, and refused to even return to disarmament talks. Commendably, the Obama Administration has rejected the old pattern of paying Kim Jong Il to keep the same broken promises again and again (or, as SecDef Gates put it, “buying the same horse twice“). Instead, the Administration seems determined to apply financial pressure, a strategy that might have come close to collapsing Kim Jong Il’s palace economy in 2006. The current level of pressure may not be sufficient to force Kim Jong Il to disarm, much less deter his continuing acts of proliferation, but there is much more we can still do to increase that pressure. Selig Harrison’s predictions notwithstanding, U.N. sanctions and weapons interdictions did not drive North Korea to new paroxysms of fury and isolation; quite the opposite, in fact. They actually coincided with Kim Jong Il dialing back the level of hostility.
Putting North Korea back on the terror-sponsor list would help us to deter more dangerous provocations of this kind, and would also be consistent with a policy of responding to provocations and stalling by increasing pressure on Kim Jong Il. Such a step is more than justified by North Korea’s recent behavior, including a threat against civilian airliners.
Indeed, when I look at Kim Jong Il’s willingness to sell anything to anybody — including a complete nuclear reactor in Syria and God-knows-whatever those North Korean technicians are building in Iran today — I conclude that Daniel Drezner’s concerns about loose nukes are exactly backwards. Given this regime’s unrestrained proliferation of pretty much anything to anyone, Drezner’s inference that we are safer with this noxious regime intact is unpersuasive and unsupported by fact. I can envision no plausible end to North Korea’s status as the Arsenal of Terror that does not involve the end of the Kim Dynasty. The more difficult problem is how we can shape a termination of that dynasty with the least possible loss of life. That is an objective we cannot hope to accomplish without a dramatic expansion of our subversive outreach to the North Korean people.
Update 2: As more reports come in, we learn more about the flight and its destination. The Times of London calls this “the biggest bust so far in the international arms embargo against North Korea.”
Two new clues suggest that my first guess — Iran — was still appears to be the most likely destination. First, the Wall Street Journal (which has more pictures) and the Times, quoting a Thai government spokesman, tell us that the plane was originally scheduled to refuel in Sri Lanka, which makes little logistical sense if the plane was headed for Pakistan (unless the itinerary was designed to confuse anyone who was tracking the flight). Second, the false manifest for the cargo was for “oil drilling equipment,” which also happens to be what the North Koreans declared for the shipment of arms seized by the UAE last summer.
Was the shipment illegal? The question is raised because of an inaccuracy in the Times’ report:
North Korea is banned form exporting any arms except light weapons, under UN Resolution 1874, which was passed in June after international outrage provoked by Pyongyang’s testing of an intercontinental rocket and a nuclear warhead.
But Paragraph 9 of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874, which cross-references Paragraph 8(b) of UNSCR 1718, bans North Korea from exporting “all arms and related materiel.” Whomever the Times relied on for its analysis of the resolutions appears to have misread UNSCR 1874 by looking at Paragraph 10, which allows North Korea to import small arms. This shipment is in clear violation of the resolution. The Times should clarify its report to note that North Korea is not allowed to export light weapons, either.
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