North Korea said Friday that the new U.S. sanctions targeting its leader Kim Jong-Un amounted to a “declaration of a war” and vowed to take strong retaliatory measures.
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Washington’s move to place North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un on its sanctions blacklist for the first time was welcomed by South Korea Thursday, with Seoul saying it would highlight human rights abuses in the hermit state.
“The government continues to commit extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrest and detention, forced labor, and torture”, said John Kirby, the State Department spokesman.
Peter Harrell, a former State Department sanctions official, said the measures would signal to companies in China, as well as others doing business with North Korea, the US would continue escalating sanctions.
Victor Cha, the Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says that the new human rights sanctions reflect Mr. Obama’s intention to force North Korea to rejoin talks to rein in its nuclear program if presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton should win the presidential election.
But inside North Korea, adulation for Kim, 32, is mandatory and he is considered infallible. In addition, the Ministry of State Security’s Prisons Bureau is responsible for the management and control of political prisoners and their confinement facilities throughout North Korea.
However, Wednesday’s sanctions mark the first time Kim has been personally targeted, and the first time that any North Korean official has been blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury in connection with reports of rights abuses.
Five government ministries and departments in North Korea were also blacklisted.
According to officials in Washington, North Korea’s Ministry of State Security holds between 80,000 to 120,000 prisoners in political prison camps where torture, execution, sexual assault, starvation and slave labour are common.
The tough rhetoric from North Korea in response to the sanctions is in line with other provocative language and actions this year.
Kim is “rather plainly ultimately responsible for the actions of his regime including its repressive policies”, a senior U.S. official said, speaking anonymously.
North Korea recently came under the most crippling sanctions by the United Nations and the West over its nuclear and ballistic missile tests.
“But that doesn’t mean this still isn’t the right thing to do and it doesn’t mean that it still isn’t the right thing for us to continue to pursue”, he added.
The Chinese are concerned the missile defense system could be used against them, and the USA sanctions could hit Chinese companies that trade with North Korea.
The sanctions imposed on Kim Jong-Un place a freeze any properties he may own in the USA and prevents him from doing business with United States citizens.
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It’s the first time that Kim Jong-Un has personally been targeted by restrictive measures, while North Korea has been under United Nations sanctions since 2006.
