U.N.'s Reading List for N. Korea

U.N.'s Reading List for N. Korea
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT - Special to the Sun
May 25, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/55218


Not only has the United Nations been caught funneling cash to the rogue regime of North Korea's Kim Jong Il, but it's now emerging that the U.N. Development Program was ordering up books critical of America and President Bush for North Korean arms experts in Pyongyang, and accepted a shipment on March 14, almost two weeks after the UNDP announced that it was suspending operations in North Korea.

The UNDP-sponsored reading list for North Korean officialdom includes such titles as "Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy," "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End," and "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration."

These are among the 29 volumes that appear on a packing list, seen by this reporter, for books ordered on behalf of the North Korean government by the UNDP. Some are more focused on arms deals, or on regional powers, and all can be purchased on the open market. But that raises a number of questions. For starters, why was the UNDP, a development agency, in the business of designing and funding an arms-negotiation syllabus for North Korea?

Another question involves the sky-high price of the shipment. According to the packing list, the books were assembled and forwarded to Pyongyang by the Beijing office of a Belgian-based company, Elsingor S.A., which describes itself on its Web site as a provider of products for "green energy." For its services, including book purchases and freight fees, Elsingor charged the UNDP $2,978.78, or roughly $100 a book. A search on Amazon finds the same list of books can be purchased online, new, for a total of $826.24 — which suggests that freight fees to get this 40-lb. carton of books into North Korea (for the use of the North Korean government, no less), came to more than $2,000.

Reached by phone in Beijing, an Elsingor office worker with a French accent, who refused to give his full name, said his company does a lot of business with foreigners working in North Korea, including shipments for the European Union and fertilizer deals with the United Nations's World Food Program. He says the book shipment was part of "helping all those guys."

Yet another set of questions involves why the books were shipped out on March 9, and accepted March 14, after the UNDP had announced it was suspending operations in Pyongyang? Were they then turned over to the North Korean government, along with the $2 million or so worth of "project assets" that The New York Sun's Benny Avni reported last month had been left with North Korea by the retreating UNDP? The UNDP rationale for handing piles of property to Kim was that the assets were already in North Korea's possession. But these books arrived during the period for which the UNDP spokesman's office in New York has said, "Nothing new has been ‘given' or transferred to the DPRK authorities."

Queried by e-mail about these matters, the former UNDP resident representative in Pyongyang to whom the shipment was addressed, Timo Pakkala, refers the question to the UNDP press office in New York. There, a spokesman says they are operating "under certain constraints." These include a "pending audit" — which is now more than a month overdue, following Secretary-General Ban's promise in response to "Cash for Kim" of a report in 90 days.

The books were ordered under a "disarmament" project run in recent years out of the UNDP's Pyongyang office, as part of an initiative bankrolled in 2002 by the German government and later by Sweden. This project was meant to produce a more tractable North Korean regime by exposing Pyongyang officials to European ideas about arms control. But details eked out of the UNDP recently leave the question of whether this exercise might have served as a bonanza of free intelligence for North Korea, laced with views highly critical of American policy — all done in the name of "development," courtesy of the UNDP.

Under the project label of "Capacity Building in Arms Control and Disarmament," the UNDP served as sponsor, banker, and fixer for North Korean arms experts to visit Europe and Britain on fellowships and "study tours," including stops at security think tanks in Sweden, Germany, and Britain; meetings at NATO headquarters in Brussels and at the General Staff College of the German Armed Forces; and meetings with assorted diplomats at U.N. missions in Geneva.

The North Korean officials who went on these UNDP tours were selected via the DPRK Institute for Disarmament and Peace, a Pyongyang policy shop at the core of the arms negotiations that North Korea has used for years to manipulate, threaten, cheat, and extort concessions such as aid and fuel from countries including America. In a project document, provided by the UNDP, this institute is described in language straight out of the propaganda mills of Kim Jong Il as an outfit dedicated to "achieving disarmament and peace on the Korean peninsula, strengthening peace and security in the Asia-Pacific region," and "preventing war."

North Korean officials continued their study tours, and the UNDP continued ordering books for Pyongyang, even after North Korea's illicit and widely condemned tests last year of an intercontinental missile and, it claimed, a nuclear bomb.

Ms. Rosett is a journalist in residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.