U.S. and Macau (2009)

U.S. Department of State

Philip J. Crowley
Assistant Secretary

Daily Press Briefing

Washington, DC
June 5, 2009

11:25 a.m. EDT

[ ...Intervening Text... ]

QUESTION: One of the people on the trip is Stu Levy from Treasury. I'm wondering if there is any thought, as has been reported in, I think, the South Korean media, to imposing some kind of a BDA type of -- are you familiar with BDA? I know you weren't in government at the time of that.

MR. CROWLEY: BDA?

QUESTION: Yeah.

MR. CROWLEY: As a military guy, I would say Battle Damage Assessment, but go ahead. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: No, no, it was -- it was a bank -- it was a bank in Macau, but it actually kind of turned into a battlefield damage --

QUESTION: (Inaudible.)

QUESTION: Anyway, there were sanctions that were placed on this bank, money was frozen, and then when the North Koreans started to make some moves in the right direction, they tried to unfreeze this money and it turned out that the sanctions that you'd imposed on them were actually working better than -- they were very difficult to unravel.

Anyway, there are some reports that similar sanctions are being considered now, and I'm wondering if you can say --

MR. CROWLEY: Well, let me use that as a segue. Someone will probably ask. We have discussions ongoing in New York. Obviously, first and foremost, we've had a very strong commitment to a resolution. Now we're deliberately working on the process of determining what should be in that resolution. And I wouldn't rule out both steps to strengthen the existing sanctions that have been placed on North Korea, and obviously, Stuart Levy's presence on this team would indicate that we're both looking at how those would be structured, but also looking at other ways that we can bilaterally put pressure on North Korea to return to the negotiating process.

So I've got nothing to announce on those, but you're qu ite right; we've had various steps in the past. Some of them have been successful in getting North Korea's attention, and that is our purpose in considering further steps.

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(The briefing was concluded at 11:52 a.m.)