Each year, during the squid fishing season, between June and October, thousands of makeshift boats invade the waters of the exclusive economic zones of Japan and Russia. These coarse wooden boats, made of studded boards covered with tar, with plastic propellers and stones as anchors, belong to the flotilla of the secret North Korea. Its leader, Kim Jong-Un, is said to have ordered his people to fish more and more to feed the country, suffocated by international sanctions.

On the Russian and Japanese banks, the local inhabitants find more and more "ghost ships", these wrecks stranded. Sometimes, they even collect corpses of fishermen rejected by the sea ... Here, no one understands why North Korean poachers face the high seas on boats from another age, risking their lives.

Fishermen in the Russian Far East did not take off: while their activity was strictly regulated by quotas, the North Korean fleets came to plunder their fishery resources shamelessly, in the face and with the beard of the authorities. How are these poaching channels organized? Who directs them and who covers them? 

Exchange of good procedures

Our investigation takes us to China, notably to Dandong, a city bordering North Korea, where, in violation of international sanctions, North Korean agents illegally sell fishing licenses to Chinese boats, on behalf of the government of Pyongyang.

A major consumer of fish and seafood, China has in fact exhausted its resources through uncontrolled overfishing. Each year, around two thousand Chinese trawlers go fishing along the North Korean coast with impunity.

And if North Korea, in turn, sends its fishermen to poach in foreign waters, it is to preserve its own fishery resources and sell them at gold prices to its main trading partner, China. It thus obtains an income in foreign currency, vital for its economy, and of which it has been deprived since the sanctions of 2017.

This report is the result of a multi-month investigation, which leads to the borders of Russia, China and North Korea. Going back up the poaching networks, our reporter uncovered the cogs of an underground economy implicating states which, however, are signatories, at the UN, of economic sanctions against Pyongyang… 

This exceptional document thus lifts the veil a little more on the functioning of the most closed regime in the world, which does not hesitate to sacrifice its population for the benefit of its survival.

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