UAE stops giving visas for N Korean labourers

Dubai : The United Arab Emirates said yesterday it would stop issuing new visas to North Korean workers, becoming the latest Gulf country to limit Pyongyang’s ability to evade sanctions and raise money abroad amid tensions with the U.S.

A statement by the UAE Foreign Ministry did not address the hundreds of North Korean labourers already working in the Emirates. A call to the UAE’s Embassy in Washington was not immediately returned.

The statement said the UAE would pull its non-resident ambassador to North Korea as well as stop North Koreans from opening new businesses in the Emirates, a federation of seven sheikhdoms on the Arabian Peninsula that is a staunch U.S. ally.

The UAE “looks forward to a unified global front against North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile program,” the statement read.

Last month, Kuwait announced it would expel North Korea’s ambassador to the oil-rich country and four other diplomats, as well as limit visas. North Korea’s Embassy in Kuwait City serves as its only diplomatic outpost in the Gulf. Qatar has said “less than 1,000” North Koreans are in the country and their visas will not be renewed. North Korean labourers also are in Oman.

A 2015 U.N. report suggested that the more than 50,000 North Koreans working overseas earned Pyongyang between $1.2 billion and $2.3 billion a year. Other estimates put earnings in the hundreds of millions of
dollars.

Thousands of North Koreans work across the Gulf. Kuwait said in August that 6,064 North Korean labourers worked there. The UAE has as many as 1,500 North Korean workers, said two officials with knowledge of Pyongyang’s tactics, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence reports.

North Koreans working in the Gulf earn around $1,000 a month, with about half being kept by the North Korean government and another $300 going toward construction company managers, the officials said. That leaves workers with $200 for working straight through an entire month, they said.

North Korea also operates three Korean restaurants in the UAE — two in Dubai and one in Abu Dhabi — out of an estimated 130 it runs around the world, the officials
said.