No Luxuries For Dear Leader Kim

Looks like Bush is putting the dampners on Jong Il's Christmas (not
that he celebrates it of course!):
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The Bush administration wants North Korea's attention, so, like a scolding
parent, it's trying to make it tougher for that country's eccentric leader to
buy iPods, plasma televisions and Segway electric scooters.

The U.S. government's first-ever effort to use trade sanctions to personally
aggravate a foreign president expressly targets items believed to be favored
by Kim Jong Il or presented by him as gifts to the roughly 600 loyalist families
who run the communist government. The sanctions went into effect after
North Korea's first nuclear test on Oct. 9.

Although, Kim, who engineered a secret nuclear weapons program, has
other options for obtaining the high-end consumer electronics and other
items he wants, the list of proposed luxury sanctions, obtained by the
Associated Press, aims to make Kim's swanky life harder:

No more cognac, Rolex watches, cigarettes, artwork, expensive cars,
Harley Davidson motorcycles or even personal watercraft, such as Jet Skis.
The new ban would extend even to musical instruments and sports equipment.
The 5-foot-3 Kim is an enthusiastic basketball fan; then-Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright presented him with a ball signed by Michael Jordan
during a rare diplomatic trip in 2000. Kim's former secretary, widely believed
to be his new wife, studied piano at the Pyongyang University of Music and Dance.
Experts said the sanctions effort- being coordinated under the United Nation-
is the first ever to curtail a specific category of goods not associated with military
buildups or weapons designs, especially one so tailored to annoy a foreign leader.
U.S. officials acknowledge that enforcing the ban on black-market trading will be
difficult.

In Beijing on Wednesday, U.S. and North Korean envoys failed to reach an
agreement on when to resume six-party disarmament negotiations on Kim's
atomic weapons program. Japan's Kyodo News agency cited unidentified people
at the talks as saying that Kim demanded the U.S. freeze the luxury goods sanctions.
The population in North Korea, one of the world's most isolated economies, is
impoverished and routinely suffers widescale food shortages. So the luxury
sanctions would not target ordinary North Koreans.

"It's a new concept; it's kind of creative," said William Reinsch, a former
senior Commerce Department official who oversaw trade restrictions with
North Korea during Bill Clinton's presidency. Reinsch predicted governments
will comply with the new sanctions, but he agreed that efforts to block all
underground shipments will be frustrated.

"The problem is there has always been and will always be this group of people
who work at getting these goods illegally," Reinsch said. Small electronics, such
as iPods or laptops, are "untraceable and available all over the place," he said. U.S.
exports to North Korea are paltry, amounting to only $5.8 million last year;
nearly all those exports were food.

Source: Detroit Free Press