“Felix Abt, a Swiss entrepreneur who served as a pointperson for investments in North Korea for seven years, and headed Pyongsu, North Korea’s first foreign-invested pharmaceutical company, wrote a memoir that described repeatedly witnessing the effects of draconian US and UN sanctions on North Korea. They prevented the country, Abt wrote, from doing necessary things like rebuilding water supply and drainage systems, hindering imports of mechanical parts and fuel to operate agricultural machinery, and causing electrical shortages that are ‘the largest bottleneck to any industrial development of North Korea.’ He also noted that less than 20% of North Korea’s land is arable—which makes it heavily dependent on food imports, like his native Switzerland—yet illegal unilateral US sanctions compounded the damage caused by droughts, floods and the collapse of major trading partners like the USSR, causing between 500,000-600,000 deaths by starvation in North Korea during the 1990s (Al-Jazeera, 3/27/14). CNN calling for stricter enforcement in light of what have historically been genocidal sanctions—which are still causing harm to the North Korean people—is especially callous.
Yet CNN doesn’t seem to think it worthwhile to question the justice and legality of UN sanctions on North Korea; the report makes it seem as if only North Korea considers UN sanctions to be 'hostile acts,’ or 'questions their legitimacy.’”

Link to the full article here.