OTTAWA—Missile tests, yet more sanctions, chest-thumping and a world on edge.

The familiar and unnerving narrative around North Korea begs the question why years of sanctions have seemingly failed to slow the isolated regime’s weapons and missile programs.

Indeed, a UN expert panel declared in February that North Korea had intensified its “prohibited” activity by engaging in an “unprecedented” number of nuclear and ballistic missile tests.

That was before two tests in July revealed that North Korea had missiles capable of reaching the United States.

Those provocative launches prompted yet another round of UN sanctions earlier this month — led by the United States and backed by China — meant to exact a punishing financial penalty on North Korea.

Among its measures, it imposed a full ban on the export of coal, iron and iron ore, even seafood, goods with an estimated value topping $1 billion.

“We used to think about how we deny them resources. Now we’ve got to bankrupt them. That’s the direction the new sanctions are going,” said George Lopez, professor emeritus of peace studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Lopez also served in 2010-11 on the UN panel of experts responsible for monitoring the implementation of sanctions.

He said the early sanctions focused on denying North Korea the material and technical know-how needed for their nuclear program. But it turned out that the regime had already accumulated some of what it needed.

“They were further ahead in the material they needed and the technology expertise they had than we thought,” Lopez said in an interview.

That prompted a shift in the tactics of sanctions to try instead to squeeze the regime financially, Lopez said.

“If we can’t do the denial of products that help build the bad things, how do we deny them the currency and the monies and the earning revenue potential from exports,” he said.

“In other words, we shifted from goods to money,” he said.

He said the fact that North Korea has weathered sanctions to the degree that it has speaks to the “creativity and capitalist mind” of its leaders as well as the sophistication of international criminal networks that facilitate their trade and transactions.

In their February report, the UN experts said that North Korea was “flouting” sanctions through trade in prohibited goods, with “evasion techniques that are increasing in scale, scope and sophistication.”

The nation relies on agents who are “highly experienced and well trained in moving money, people and goods, including arms and related material, across borders,” the report said.

The country is able to manufacture and trade in “sophisticated and lucrative” military technologies using overseas networks. It continues to export banned minerals to generate revenue.

Robert Huish, an academic at Dalhousie University, says one way North Korea evades the full impact of sanctions is by exploiting lax maritime oversight to use cargo vessels to import the material that is likely critical to its weapons program while exporting goods for badly needed revenue.

For more than a year, Huish, assisted by Somed Shahadu, a master’s student at the time, tracked vessels going in and out of North Korean ports using the automatic identification system signal that broadcasts their location, speed and direction.

“There are some very suspicious candidates that show up from time to time. They tend to be the types of vessels that can carry fuel, large mechanical equipment,” said Huish, an associate professor in the university’s department of international development studies.

While sanctions are meant to severely restrict North Korean shipping, the country is able to manipulate the system and “they do it very, very well” using flags of convenience set up through offshore shell companies, he said in an interview

“You may have a North Korean operated vessel that has a flag from Kiribati, is owned and managed out of Hong Kong and actually has insurance from a British company,” he said.

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“On paper it looks legit but if you follow where that vessel is going to and from, it’s in direct violation of the sanctions,” he said.

Huish said that he and Shahadu tracked some 80 vessels in all that seemed to frequent North Korean ports, sometimes with deceptive behaviour.

“We’ve seen vessels that have left ports broadcasting a certain destination and winds up within a North Korean harbour,” he said.

Other times, vessels would appear on the maritime tracking along the coast of the Korean peninsula, only to disappear, apparently after turning off their identification system, he said.

Huish said that some vessels identified as contributing to breaking sanctions, have been reflagged and renamed to get around UN bans.

The February report of the expert panel said that North Korean continues to export arms, such as small arms and light weapons ammunition as well as minerals.

Last year, Egyptian authorities intercepted the vessel Jie Shun, flying under a Cambodian flag, that had sailed from North Korea. Some 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades were found in wooden crates buried under a cargo of iron ore.

To further curb such maritime traffic, Huish said that the international community should step up efforts to target the locales were shell companies are established to run the vessels and go after the insurance firms that provide the coverage.

Lopez said that the UN took action in 2011 to identify shipping companies and vessels suspected of helping North Koreans skirt sanctions. As well, there’s been increasing efforts to pressure jurisdictions that provide flags of convenience to stop abetting the regime, he said.

As a result, “there’s less and less that is coming through shipping,” Lopez said.

“If I worry about liquid fuel propellant, I worry about it on railroads or trucks from Russia and those are so much harder to discover,” he said.

But the new round of sanctions does further crackdown on maritime trade, to designate vessels suspected of breaking the sanctions and barring them from entering ports around the globe.

Lopez said that sanctions are a tool to enforce a policy but it’s not clear that the current Trump administration has realistic objectives in the region.

“That’s one of the scariest things for some of us. It’s not just the bluster. It’s the lack of real informed experience about the way that international relations in that region work,” he said.

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