TOKYO: Backed by the threat of economic sanctions, Japan will use this week's talks on North Korea's nuclear ambitions to pursue its agenda of resolving the question of Japanese kidnapped by Pyongyang's agents.
The two-pronged approach has already been denounced by North Korea as a stumbling block to the multilateral talks opening in Beijing on Wednesday and Japanese leaders have conceded there is little prospect of an immediate breakthrough in the decades-old abduction issue.
But the United States has promised to support Japan's position - in line with its own - of using both "dialogue and pressure" in dealing with the North. "We wish to extract as positive a response as possible from the North Korean side," a Japanese diplomat said, hoping for continued formal bilateral contacts on the abduction issue, which were resumed only two weeks ago after a break of 16 months.
In a rare show of unity to pressurize Pyongyang over the nuclear and abduction issues, Japan's ruling and opposition parties earlier this month passed legislation that makes it easier to block payments to North Korea.
Still in the pipeline is a bill aimed at banning North Korean ships from entering Japanese ports if they are deemed a threat to the country's security, following allegations that some of them are engaged in smuggling and spying.
"We basically hope to pass the bill within the current session of parliament" due to end in June, Shinzo Abe, secretary-general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, said in a weekend speech. "The government needs various cards up its sleeve to negotiate with North Korea."
Apart from seeking to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear arms programme, Tokyo is also demanding it come clean on the abductions of Japanese by North Korean agents.
North Korea has admitted to kidnapping 13 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s to use them for training spies in Japanese language and culture. Eight of them were alleged to have died.
That revelation infuriated Japanese public opinion and largely cancelled out any political capital for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi from a historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang in September 2002.
The five survivors, two couples and the wife of an alleged US army deserter, came home in late 2002 and have refused to go back to the North. Tokyo demands that their seven children be allowed to settle in Japan and that the deaths of the eight kidnap victims should be explained in full.
It suspects that the eight are still alive and that dozens of more Japanese might have been also spirited away to the secretive country. Japan has insisted that a solution to the kidnap row is a pre-condition to talks on the normalization of diplomatic ties, which could bring massive economic aid to the impoverished North.
North Korea has bitterly attacked the amended law on foreign exchange control, which provides for unilaterally applying sanctions against it without any UN resolution or international agreement.
John Bolton, the US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, said here last week that the abductions were acts of terrorism and vowed Washington would "stand very firmly with Japan" in dealing with the issue. -AFP
