By Samuel Ramani
On March 21, 2017, Serbia’s Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic praised North Korea’s refusal to recognize Kosovo’s independence. To reward North Korea’s loyal support for the Serbian position on Kosovo, Belgrade defied European attempts to isolate Pyongyang by arranging a meeting between Dacic and Ri Pyong-du, North Korea’s Bucharest-based ambassador to Serbia. During their meeting, Dacic emphasized the need for a diplomatic solution to the North Korean crisis, and expressed support for the revival of multilateral negotiations to defuse the standoff.
Many Western analysts have explained Serbia’s ongoing diplomatic engagement with North Korea and the DPRK’s opposition to Kosovo’s declaration of independence by highlighting the historically close relationship between Pyongyang and Belgrade. During the Cold War, Josip Broz Tito and Kim Il-sung established a strong diplomatic alliance, as Yugoslavia and North Korea were both non-aligned communist states.
This alliance continued after the collapse of communism in Yugoslavia. During the 1990s, North Korea maintained trade links with Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian government, despite crippling international sanctions against Belgrade, and consistently expressed diplomatic support for Milosevic’s regime until his overthrow in October 2000.
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Even though these historical memories undoubtedly shape the cordial relationship between Serbia and North Korea, the long-term implications of the 1999 NATO bombings in Serbia on North Korea’s foreign policy conduct have been given scant attention in the West. This neglect is short-sighted, as many of the defining trends of Pyongyang’s foreign and security policy that have shaped the current standoff on the Korean peninsula were direct consequences of the 1999 Kosovo War.
The first significant dimension of North Korean foreign policy that crystallized after the 1999 Kosovo War is the DPRK’s alignment with China. The official responses of the North Korean and Chinese governments to NATO’s military efforts to dislodge Serbian forces from Kosovo were strikingly similar. The Chinese government repeatedly condemned NATO’s intervention as a war of aggression against Serbia, as Serbia was a sovereign state that was outside of NATO’s sphere of influence. The North Korean government responded similarly by urging the international community to resist U.S. aggression against Serbia in 1999, and praising Milosevic’s “heroic” resistance to NATO in February 2000.
https://thediplomat.com/2017/10/what-north-korea-learned-from-the-kosovo-war/
