Sanctions Are Hurting North Korea. Can They Make Kim Give In?

‘Maximum Pressure’

The latest rounds of United Nations sanctions have been like no others that North Korea has faced before.

Since September, the United Nations Security Council has banned all key North Korean exports, including coal, iron ore, seafood and textiles. If enforced fully, they could eliminate a full 90 percent of the country’s total exports in dollar terms.

Especially painful was the decision last December to limit the North’s imports of refined petroleum products to half a million barrels a year, a 90 percent reduction from the previous year.

North Korea can still extract 1.2 million barrels of gasoline, diesel and kerosene from the four million barrels of crude oil a year it is allowed to import, mostly from China, said an energy analyst, Lee Jong-heon. But the combined 1.7 million barrels of refined petroleum would be less than half the amount needed to run all of the 280,000 cars in North Korea, much less heat homes and meet other needs, Mr. Lee said.

Experts said the sanctions, and China’s apparent willingness to enforce many of them, had dealt a blow to one of the few bright points in the North Korean economy: trade with China, which had been an eager market for ore and other North Korean natural resources.

“Production has sharply decreased, if not come to a compete halt, in coal, iron, zinc and copper mines,” said Jiro Ishimaru, who runs Asia Press, a Japan-based website that monitors North Korea with the help of informants inside the country. “Many miners don’t report for work because management can’t provide rations or pay wages.”

North Korean exports to China, which account for more than 90 percent of the North’s external trade, plunged by one-third to $1.65 billion last year, with volumes dropping by 60 to 95 percent in recent months. Its official trade deficit against China more than doubled to $1.68 billion last year.

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“Petty traders from the North who used to cross into China in the morning on foot or in small cars and then returned in the evening with auto parts and food to sell on the black market no longer come,” said Wu Qiang, a North Korea expert in China.

The sanctions have also led China and other nations to send home tens of thousands of North Korean workers, cutting off another key source of hard currency for Mr. Kim’s government.

Without foreign currency, North Korea will struggle to finance imports of consumer goods for its people and raw materials for its factories. It will also be unable to import fertilizer in time for the planting season, raising the specter of a return of food shortages, said Jin Qiangyi, director of the Center for North and South Korea Studies at Yanbian University.

Humanitarian aid workers who have recently visited the country warn that food shortages could be exacerbated by the lack of fuel, which could hamper North Korea’s ability to transport grain from areas of surplus to places where there is not enough. Trucks that used to carry goods twice a day now run only once a day on some routes, though some are extending their decks to carry more loads.

Recent visitors also describe shortages of medicine. This was evident last year, when South Korean doctors operated on a North Korean soldier who defected through a hail of bullets. When they examined him, they found his intestines filled with worms.

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