Vidas Engineering Services, with offices in this suburban-Kampala building, continues to have close ties with North Korea. EDWARD ECHWALU FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
NAKASONGOLA, Uganda—Inside one of Uganda’s air bases behind rings of security lurks a resource the nation pledged two years ago to jettison—North Korean soldiers.
The commandos, from North Korea’s special-operations division, are covertly training Uganda’s elite troops in skills from martial arts to helicopter-gunnery operations, say senior Ugandan military officers.
The instructors are among the North Korean soldiers, companies, contractors and arms dealers operating around the world in violation of United Nations sanctions, helping Pyongyang skirt a Washington-led “maximum pressure” campaign, say military officers and foreign diplomats.
The pattern traces across a swath of smaller nations, many in Africa, that have pledged to sever relations nurtured over decades as part of a U.N. campaign to pressure North Korea to drop its nuclear-weapons programs. Instead, countries such as Tanzania, Sudan, Zambia and Mozambique are making their ties more surreptitious, say diplomats and defense-industry analysts. Representatives of the four countries didn’t respond to requests for comment.
North Korean operatives or Pyongyang-controlled companies in those countries and Uganda offer cut-price military training, weapons, workers or other services, generating foreign exchange for Pyongyang, these people say. The U.N. started ramping up its sanctions campaign against North Korea in 2016, a U.S.-led effort that requires members, among other actions, to stop issuing visas to North Korea’s researchers and military advisers, to close down companies controlled by the nation and to stop the flow of money back to the Kim regime.
Combat Catalog
Despite sanctions, North Korea has supplied military gear and training to clients around the world, much of it based on Cold War-era designs. A look at its capabilities:
Source: ‘Target Markets’ by Andrea Berger
Ugandan officers working with the North Koreans say they have strict instructions: Never speak of them, never take their photos.
“We never ended our ties,” said an officer who described how North Korean commanders recently trained him in close combat. “They just moved underground.”
The number of North Korean Embassy officials has significantly expanded in the past year, some diplomats and Ugandan officials say. Uganda’s Foreign Ministry declined to provide a number of registered North Korean diplomats and didn’t respond to requests for comment on North Koreans operating in the country. Uganda’s presidency didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The North Korean Embassy in Kampala, Uganda. PHOTO: EDWARD ECHWALU FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
A Defense Ministry spokesman said in a statement: “These are despicable allegations.” Uganda’s defense force, he said, “has totally complied with the UN Security Council resolutions on the subject and the Uganda government as required of it, has made numerous reports to the UN in that regard.” Asked directly whether there were North Koreans training in the country, he didn’t respond.
The American Embassy in Uganda and the Pentagon’s U.S. Africa Command didn’t respond to requests for comment. U.S. officials say many in the Trump administration have been instructed to remain quiet on North Korean defiance over concern speaking out could undercut the image of an effective sanctions regime or weigh on negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang. The White House referred questions to the State Department, which didn’t respond to requests for comment.
North Korea’s representatives at its Kampala embassy and in Geneva didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Keeping lines open with smaller nations helps the Kim Jong Un regime ensure its economy isn’t reliant only on China, says Justin Hastings, a University of Sydney expert on North Korea’s economy. “The North Koreans will do anything to make money anywhere.” Beijing, traditionally Pyongyang’s main patron, began enforcing sanctions more vigorously this year.
North Korean books, calendars, money counters and document shredders sit in a former Mansudae office in Namibia. PHOTO: JOE PARKINSON/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
For African nations, incentives range from thrift to geopolitics, say defense analysts and government officials. The military contracts offer inexpensive equipment and expertise and opportunities for official corruption.
Signs that North Koreans have departed from some operations among erstwhile African allies include offices of Mansudae in Namibia. North Koreans working at the company, which is included in the U.N. sanctions, left so abruptly the building is strewn with their detritus. Blueprints, money counters, shredders stuffed with Korean documents and large socialist-realist paintings of Korean landscapes could be seen long after authorities shut the operation last year. A Namibian government spokesman didn’t respond to requests for comment.
‘Team of experts’
In 2016, Uganda said it would halt military cooperation with Pyongyang. At the September 2017 U.N. General Assembly meeting where Mr. Trump referred to the North Korean leader as “rocket man,” Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said his government was in compliance with tougher sanctions. Official reports this year from Uganda’s foreign ministry and defense forces said the nation had severed all North Korean military and economic ties.
On a visit to the Nakasongola air base last month, a Wall Street Journal reporter saw four men whom Ugandan military officers and villagers identified as North Korean. Classified military documents sent to the army’s top six military commanders in October, reviewed by the Journal, instruct officers to prepare for training from “a team of experts from North Korea.”
RELATED
- Fake Signals and Illegal Flags: How North Korea Uses Clandestine Shipping to Fund Regime
- North Korean Coal Slipped Into South Despite Warning From U.S.
- U.S. Files Suit to Seize Assets Tied to Alleged North Korean Money Laundering
- North Korea’s Secret Army: How Operatives Abroad Aid the Regime
- Thousands of North Korean Workers Enter Russia Despite U.N. Ban
- China, Finally, Clamps Down on North Korea Trade—And the Impact Is Stinging
From the North Korean Embassy, officials are using diplomatic cover to continue the work of Korea Mining and Development Trading Corp., or Komid, according to diplomats and Ugandan military officers. Komid, Pyongyang’s chief arms-dealing company, is sanctioned by the U.N. for selling weapons across Africa and the Middle East. Komid didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Two military officers say they viewed documents confirming North Korean weapons deliveries as recently as August that included antitank systems, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms. The weapons, for Uganda’s special forces, were shipped through a Kenyan port and driven across Uganda’s border at night, they say.
The North Korean presence is visible beyond the military. Last month at a private hospital in southern Uganda, dozens of doctors could be seen whom staff identified as North Korean.
North Korean-controlled construction and mining companies under investigation by the U.N. for sanctions violations are relisting in Uganda with new names, identifying themselves as Chinese or simply as “foreign,” according to corporate filings with the government.
A U.N. report says Uganda’s government hasn’t answered questions from U.N. sanctions monitors on Komid activity. “Uganda is an important litmus test for implementation of U.N. sanctions in Africa,” says Hugh Griffiths, head of the panel of experts. “Uganda have never provided information on whom the most senior Komid officials were meeting with in Uganda during multiple weeklong visits.”
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni with a senior North Korean official in Entebbe in 2014. PHOTO:AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
The North Korean activities suggest Mr. Museveni believes violations in smaller nations won’t halt the momentum toward a detente between Washington and Pyongyang, diplomats and defense analysts say.
Mr. Museveni has ruled Uganda since 1986. He has for decades pivoted between alliances with the erstwhile Communist bloc, the West and China. He has long ties with the Kim dynasty. He first traveled to Pyongyang in 1987 to meet Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, who cultivated alliances across Africa during the Cold War. North Korea in 2014 awarded Mr. Museveni its highest state honor, the Kim Il Sung Prize, which he declined, likely to avoid upsetting the West.
Uganda built its tank units around North Korean armored-warfare doctrine. Dozens of top military officials, including Uganda’s special-forces commander and Mr. Museveni’s son and rumored heir, studied at Kim Il Sung military academy. When Mr. Museveni first visited South Korea in 2013, he surprised officials by greeting them in Korean, saying he had learned it from Kim Il Sung.
Uganda built its tank units around North Korean armored-warfare doctrine. Ugandan tanks, above, in South Sudan in 2015. PHOTO: SAMIR BOL/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
After Kim Jong Un inherited power in 2011 and expanded weapons programs, South Korea pushed hard to flip Mr. Museveni into the Western camp. Then-President Park Geun-hye traveled to Kampala in 2016, the first visit by a South Korean president since 1963, and offered investment pledges from infrastructure to military equipment.
Two weeks later, Uganda’s foreign ministry said the nation would cut economic and military contracts with North Korea and dozens of military experts and two officials from Komid would leave the country.
After sanctions
After Mr. Museveni’s 2017 pledge at the U.N., monitors spotted inconsistencies. “Some of the soldiers left,” says one Western diplomat, “but not all.”
And there was evidence payments were still heading to North Korea. In January, authorities at Uganda’s Entebbe airport seized a North Korean diplomatic pouch after U.S. intelligence agencies told them it contained cash, gold and documents showing Komid activities across the region, according to Ugandan officials, Western diplomats and local media.
The pouch, carried by Komid officials’ wives about to fly out of Uganda, was taken into the custody of Uganda’s Foreign Ministry, which placed the gold bars in Uganda’s central bank, these people say. The next day, the bag was moved to police headquarters, then disappeared, they say.
President Trump with Mr. Museveni during the U.N. General Assembly in 2017. PHOTO: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
U.S. officials complained to Mr. Museveni that the pouch might have been in violation of sanctions, and he agreed to investigate, say some of the diplomats. Western intelligence agencies, they say, believe North Korean officials bribed civil servants in Uganda’s Defense Ministry to protect the cargo.
According to a draft of a recent U.N. report, “senior levels of Uganda’s Ministry of Defense may have been witting of the relationship with KOMID.” Mr. Museveni pledged to reassign one of the defense-ministry officials, Western and Ugandan officials say. The official remains in place.
In March, three Ugandan universities said they would terminate dozens of North Korean lecturers’ and researchers’ contracts after complaints from diplomats and sanctions monitors. New U.N. rules last year compelled governments to stop issuing new visas to North Korean workers. Such workers typically give earnings to the regime, say defectors and human-rights groups.
Last month at Kampala International University, a private teaching hospital 200 miles south of the capital, doctors whom staff identified as North Korean were walking the corridors, tending to patients or operating radiology machines. Women who staff said were North Korean doctors’ wives worked in the textile room cleaning uniforms. Some wore red lapel pins favored by North Korean officials.
A doctor identifying himself as from North Korea initially said he had come on a government research program. Upon further questioning, he became angry and tried to tear pages from a Journal reporter’s notebook. “I am a visitor,” he said. “I am leaving here tomorrow.”
Doctors at Kampala International University teaching hospital this month. PHOTO: ESTHER RUTH MBABAZI
A Ugandan customs official says he received a request from the hospital in October for 16 more visas for North Korean doctors. Hospital officials confirmed the workers seen there were North Korean but didn’t comment on their legality or the visa requests.
At the center of economic ties is Malaysia Korea Partners, or MKP, a company that U.N. monitors say is part of a joint venture of North Korean entities directed by the intelligence agency responsible for clandestine operations. It has earned tens of millions of dollars for the Kim regime on projects in Uganda, Angola and Zambia over the past decade, the Journal reported last year, citing analysts who evaluated MKP.
The three directors of MKP’s Uganda operations—North Korean nationals Edward Han and Young Kyong Kin and Libyan Muhamed Benomran—are operating through at least four joint ventures where they are listed as board members, official records show. MKP and Mr. Han didn’t respond to requests for comment. Messrs. Young and Benomran couldn’t be reached for comment.
A company listed as an affiliate, Vidas Engineering Services Co., is executing former MKP contracts, including the continuing construction of a $56 million water project in four Ugandan regions, a public prospectus shows. German development bank KfW Group has co-financed the project. Vidas didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for KfW said the company is “strictly following all relevant sanction regimes” and had started “a detailed examination regarding the case.”
In December, Mr. Young changed his nationality in company listings from North Korean to Malaysian, and the new MKP-linked companies added two new Ugandan directors—a ruling-party lawmaker and her husband, a Ugandan spy-agency officer. Both are considered Museveni allies. The two new directors didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Some North Korean military officials who stayed after sanctions tightened moved from an air base near the capital to remote locations, including a pilot-training school in eastern Uganda, Ugandan military officers say. North Korean military advisers are working with Uganda’s Armored Brigade to assemble and repair armored personnel carriers, say the some of the officers and a U.S. Defense Department adviser. They are also helping set up the University of Military Technology in Lugazi, 30 miles from Kampala.
The North Koreans are moved in Toyota Land Cruisers, said one of the officers, who pointed out several such vehicles. The vehicles’ license plates aren’t listed in public directories.
A North Korean official inspected weapons at a police training academy in Kampala in 2013. PHOTO:AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Ugandan military officers say the trainers are paid as contractors in cash from Uganda’s classified military budget, an opaque offshoot of the defense budget. “Museveni knows that North Korea has problems with the international community, but the classified defense budget is not transparent and never audited,” says Ibrahim Ssemuju, an opposition lawmaker on the Uganda parliament’s public-accounts committee.
A military document from July marked restricted outlines new courses suggested by North Korean Embassy officials, including “hovercraft assembly” and “heavy equipment operation and maintenance.”
Some equipment from North Korea appears to be of Cold War designs that can be serviced by only a shrinking number of people. “We cannot afford to chase these guys out,” says one officer. “We don’t have someone servicing the guns on helicopters.”
A course called “Q” in which North Koreans teach close combat and fighting in built-up areas will soon be offered to officers beyond special forces, senior officers say. At Magamaga base on Lake Victoria’s eastern shores, they say, North Koreans are in an area sealed off for an amphibious-warfare course.
“The Americans give you money but only if you work on their interest,” one officer says. “We have a better relationship with North Korea in terms of combat.”
Ugandan special-forces soldiers in 2016. PHOTO: UGANDAN SPECIAL FORCES COMMAND
—Ian Talley in Washington, D.C., contributed to this article.
Write to Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com
