Where Can I Find An Honest North Korean?

It’s prudent for the US to tap American NGOs, to distribute flood aid to the DPRK, because UNDP appears rotten to the core.

In 2007, the U.S. mission to the U.N. shined a light on the U.N. agency’s record of gross mismanagement while operating in that rogue dictatorship, including large sums of money that vanished after being transferred to Pyongyang and dual-use technology shipped to the North without U.S. export licenses.

These abuses came to light thanks in part to a whistleblower by the name of Artjon Shkurtaj, an Albanian-born accountant who served as chief of operations for all U.N. operations in North Korea in the mid-2000s. Mr. Shkurtaj was outraged at the violations he saw and after two years of trying to get his superiors at UNDP headquarters in New York to take corrective action, he took his information to the U.S. mission to the U.N.

The UNDP responded by firing him and taking every opportunity to malign his integrity. When Mr. Shkurtaj complained, a UNDP-sponsored investigation found that his firing had not been in retaliation for blowing the whistle. What a surprise. The U.N. bureaucracy and its diplomatic coterie also circled the wagons and attacked the U.S. mission for daring to raise the subject.

Letting a South Korean politician run an organization with any dealings with a North or South Korean organization just looks like a recipe for scandal. Humanitarian arguments, is there any good reason to send aid to Pyongyang? Even worse, the North Koreans lie to duck sanctions, too.

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Filed under: IGOs, Korea Tagged: Artjon Shkurtaj, ban ki moon, dprk, north korea, undp, whistle-blowing