North Korea has re-established its diplomatic ties with Burkina Faso, the West African country’s foreign minister announced at a government meeting late last month. This follows a coup that brought a new junta to power in that country last fall.
Pyongyang will send an ambassador, Chae Hui Chol, to represent North Korea, the government of Burkina Faso revealed in a summary of the March 29 meeting of its ministerial council, and he will reside in Senegal’s capital city, Dakar. Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news service first reported the news.
Burkina Faso hopes to establish an ambitious partnership with North Korea, encompassing not just a diplomatic relationship but also cooperation in other far-reaching areas.
Foreign minister Olivia Rouamba said at the meeting that the resumption of the relationship between the two countries will allow “exemplary bilateral cooperation on security, taxes, military equipment, mining, health, agriculture, and research.”
It’s not immediately clear what forms this cooperation will take. However, North Korea has long shored up its other partners, such as Russia and China, by sending laborers abroad to work in conditions that some critics say resemble slavery.
Previously, Rouamba also said, the two countries had had a “privileged partnership” during Burkina Faso’s August 1983 revolution. That uprising brought a contingent of Marxist military officers to power for several years.
Burkina Faso cut off its diplomatic relationship with North Korea in 2017, amid a U.N. effort to force compliance with Security Council resolutions on Pyongyang’s nuclear program, Anadolu noted.
In 2017, Burkina Faso also moved to cut off imports from North Korea, after the government became aware that the country’s imports from January to August of that year reached $7 million, then–foreign minister Alpha Barry told Voice of America. At the time, the landlocked West African country was the largest importer of North Korean products in Africa, as the U.N. was seeking to clamp down on Pyongyang’s international economic lifelines.
In that same VOA article, Grant Harris, a former national-security council official in the Obama administration, said that the U.S. should help African countries that have extensive ties to North Korea wean themselves off their economic dependencies on the East Asian dictatorship.