North Korea and Yemen
Didn’t the trade minister of NK visit Yemen June 2005? They inked trade agreements if I recall.
The Times UK: The greatest danger from Monday’s underground nuclear test may lie not in the potential for a missile attack on another country, but in the export of nuclear devices or technology, to which President Bush referred in his first remarks on the explosion.
Peter Beck, of the International Crisis Group in Seoul, said: “I’m not worried about them using one of their warheads on a neighbour because that would be suicide. But given their record of selling whatever they have — drugs, missile technology, counterfeit currency — the primary concern has to be proliferation.”
Illegal export businesses that North Korea is accused of operating include the manufacture and sale of drugs, counterfeit currency, fake brand goods such as cigarettes, the forging of tax revenue stamps and money laundering. On top of this there is the lucrative trade in weapons, principally missile parts, which is perfectly legal but deplored by the United States and its allies.
Over the years North Korea’s partners in these enterprises have ranged from Japanese yakuza, Russian drug dealers, Irish republican terrorists, bankers in Macau, ivory poachers in Africa, and the Armed Forces of Egypt, Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Vietnam and Yemen.
Indian Express: In this context, it needs to be mentioned that one of the variants of the Iranian Shahab missiles is believed to be a variant of the North Korean Nodong missiles. Apart from Pakistan and Iran, other known beneficiaries of North Korean missile supplies are Libya, Syria and Yemen. In his book Nuclear Terror: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, Graham Allison has disclosed that the North Koreans set up a company, New World Trading Slovakia, in Bratislava, to buy materials for their own nuclear programme and to sell missile technology to countries such as Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran and Vietnam. The Slovakian police raided the company run by two North Koreans.
Seattle PI: Also of concern, North Korea sells its weaponry to unstable or undemocratic states that may not have adequate control over their arsenals. That includes Iran and Syria, noted Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., the chairman of the House intelligence policy subcommittee that recently issued a Republican-drafted report on the North Korean threat.
In another case, “Yemen is trying to help (the United States) and they have made some public efforts – at least in p.r. efforts – when it comes to helping us on terrorism,” Rogers said. “But Yemen has a troubled history.”
