Statues and ammunition North Korea's illicit African connections
Windhoek, Namibia (CNN)Heroes' Acre looms on a hill overlooking Windhoek, Namibia's tidy capital.
Under a brilliant blue sky, a series of granite steps slope upwards in a wedge toward a triumphant bronze statue of an unknown soldier.
In one hand the liberation-struggle soldier carries a Kalashnikov rifle. In the other, he's throwing what looks like a Soviet-era stick grenade.
The communist-style design is no coincidence. Heroes' Acre was built by a North Korean firm.
The Hero's Acre statue in Namibia.
Across Africa from here to Gaborone, from Luanda to Dakar, governments have been quietly doing deals with the North Korean state for years.
And as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un marches ever-closer to arming an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead, United States and United Nations investigators are looking a lot more closely at Pyongyang's African connection.
The UN says many of the contracts are with Mansudae, a North Korean state-owned enterprise and a cash cow for the rogue regime.
"This money is highly significant," said Hugh Griffiths, the coordinator of the UN Panel of Experts on North Korea, the body charged with monitoring sanctions enforcement on the country.
"We are looking at at least 14 African (UN) member states where Mansudae alone was running quite large construction operations -- building everything from ammunition factories, to presidential palaces, to apartment blocks."
Frequently, the contracts involve monuments like Heroes' Acre.
All in
The statues can be gargantuan -- the African Renaissance Monument in Dakar is nearly 40 meters high (160 feet). They commemorate liberation heroes and independence movements and resemble the statues of Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il, North Korea's previous two leaders and the grandfather and father of Kim Jong Un.
Griffiths says tens of millions of dollars are being made by Mansudae in Africa.
"North Koreans can make a little money go a long way," said Griffiths.
Multiple attempts by CNN to reach Mansudae in Namibia through phone numbers listed by US Treasury sanctions were unsuccessful. A representative of the North Korean Embassy in South Africa, which has allegedly acted as a transit point for illicit cash in the region, refused to respond to questions about Mansudae.
Namibia, for its part, went all in with North Korea.
There's the statue of Sam Nujoma, Namibia's founding father, holding the constitution in front of the gold-tinted National Museum (known as the "percolator" by some locals for its unusual shape), and the recently constructed presidential palace with a giant brass marshal eagle on a pedestal out front.
All were built on contracts with the rogue regime.
The Namibian government admits they had contracts, but said they did nothing wrong.
"All of these were agreed before the sanctions by the UN. But when the sanctions were imposed we had to comply and then we had to cease all the contracts, we had to terminate the contracts we had with North Korea," Namibia's Deputy Prime Minister Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah told CNN.
Namibia's presidential palace.
Left in a hurry
Mansudae's statue business was put under United Nations Security Council sanctions in late 2016.
The UN panel says that the North Korean enterprise worked closely in Namibia with another entity called the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation (KOMID), which the US Treasury Department describes as North Korea's chief arms dealer. KOMID has been sanctioned since 2009.
Just outside Windhoek's picturesque downtown in an industrial area near Namibia's largest brewery sits a sprawling warehouse complex guarded by closed circuit television cameras and high fencing.
With garish lions standing guard at the gate and animal scenes painted on the front wall, it could easily be mistaken for a tourist company.
A statue of a lion outside the warehouse in Namibia.
But CNN's review of title deeds show that the property was sold in 2004 to Mansudae for around 1.6 million Namibian dollars (about $120,000) and the North Korean company still owns it.
And it seems Mansudae's headquarters was active until just weeks ago.
Johann Karstens, the manager of a nearby tire manufacturer, told CNN he would come most mornings to see what was going on with his unusual neighbors.
"There were only men in the compound living and working," he said.
"They were moving their big construction trucks quickly in and out, but never hung around outside."
From the tire shop on a hill above the Mansudae's property, one can see a sprawling complex of warehouses, vegetable gardens and greenhouses. In the garden, a scarecrow is raised on a post wearing the gray-blue uniform typical of North Korean workers.
The warehouse just outside Namibia's capital.
But there isn't any sign of the North Koreans.
"Two or three weeks ago I saw the last ones leave in a pickup," Karstens said when we spoke to him in early October.
Mauritz van Niekerk, a neighbor to the other side of the compound, corroborated that timeline. And she noted something else.
"I would often see government vehicles going in and out," she said, adding they had special government license plates well known to Namibians.
Plausible deniability?
For countries like Namibia, likely to receive at least $60 million in aid, the North Korean connections are particularly awkward.
"We know that the activities that have been taking place in activities in which the Koreans are involved could not really be considered to be generating such a heavy amount (of money)," Namibia's Deputy Prime Minister Nandi-Ndaitwah said.
Nandi-Ndaitwah insists that Namibia has ceased all North Korean operations and all North Korean construction workers have left the country, in accordance with UN sanctions.
Last year, the Namibian government-owned newspaper New Era reported that Namibian officials had met with UN counterparts in New York and had been exonerated.
Nandi-Ndaitwah says that is a misunderstanding.
"We continue to give our reports," Nandi-Ndaitwah said.
But Griffiths, the UN coordinator, disputes this. He says the UN panel hasn't received responses from Namibia to specific queries for more than a year.
"It is not enough to talk in the media. It is not enough to say you have been exonerated by the UN for North Korean sanctions violations because that is not true. The panel deals with hard facts -- with evidence -- and this is what we have been asking for many months now," said Griffiths.
Of the other African countries named in UN sanctions reports, other than Namibia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Tanzania and Angola have yet to reply to inquiries, according to the panel's annual report, which came out in February.
But without an enforcement branch, the UN panel sometimes struggles to get answers from member states across the globe.
"It's a function of not being forthright and dragging your feet. All of those things give the opportunity for those types of governments to use plausible deniability," said John Park, director of the Korean Working Group at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Photos: African statues and structures built by North Korea
The Namibian State House, home to the country's presidential residence and office of the president.
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Photos: African statues and structures built by North Korea
A statue of slain Congolese President Mzee Laurent Desire Kabila in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.
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Photos: African statues and structures built by North Korea
The Tiglachin Monument in Ethiopia's capital of Addis Ababa.
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Photos: African statues and structures built by North Korea
A statue of Mozambique's first president Samora Moises Machel in Maputo.
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Photos: African statues and structures built by North Korea
The statue of Sam Nujoma, the first president of Namibia, in front of the new Independence Memorial Museum in Windhoek, Namibia. Both were built by North Korea, according to the UN Panel of Experts on North Korea. It's one of a number of statues and buildings throughout Africa built by North Korean state companies.
