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Tokyo-Pyongyang: Re-abduction issue
stalls talks
By Axel Berkofsky
The most recent talks between Japan and North
Korea, which took place in Dalian, China, on November
23-24, were pretty much business as usual: Pyongyang is
simply not interested in resuming negotiations on
normalization of bilateral relations with Tokyo, nor in
discussing security issues, nuclear weapons, or anything
else.
The issue of kidnapped Japanese was also
supposed to be on the agenda of the secret meeting, but
on that subject, too, Pyongyang now seems less and less
prepared to settle the issue for good.
In
September during the Japanese-North Korean summit in
Pyongyang, the North Korean government admitted that 15
Japanese citizens were abducted to North Korea in the
1970s and 1980s and "employed" teaching Japanese to
North Korean secret agents. The five surviving abductees
returned to Japan on October 15, but what was meant to
be a two-week stay in Japan reacquainting themselves
with their families might now turn out to be a permanent
stay as far as the Japanese government is concerned.
In the bizarre logic that is the hallmark of any
negotiations with Pyongyang, North Korea is complaining
that Japan has abducted the abductees.
"Pyongyang wants its abductees back" was the
message Japan's chief negotiator, Hitoshi Tanaka,
director general of the Foreign Ministry's Asian and
Oceanian Affairs Bureau, delivered to Japanese Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi when he returned from Dalian.
Koizumi was unimpressed and announced that Japan would
continue to "negotiate patiently" even though Tanaka's
North Korean counterpart had apparently long run out of
patience.
The North Korean negotiator at the
Dalian talks, who was described as a "secretive and
powerful military officer close to Kim Jong-il", ignored
Tanaka's efforts to set up anything resembling a
dialogue, but came straight to the point when
elaborating on North Korea's ways of dealing with
diplomatic failure. "If you fail in these talks, at most
you will lose your position. I have a pistol here to use
on myself," was his straightforward contribution at the
negotiation table.
After his announcement to
take responsibility for the diplomatic mess on the spot,
North Korea's official news agency took over, hammering
out more of the usual belligerent rhetoric. "Japan's
refusal to allow the five abduction victims to return to
North Korea will result in serious consequences,
including the indefinite postponement of security talks.
Japan should allow the five abductees to return to North
Korea, as promised, before their families go to Japan,"
the Korean Central News Agency railed.
What
promise?
"Can't remember having ever made such a
promise," chief cabinet secretary Yasuo Fukuda said.
"Our counterpart unilaterally understood that such a
promise had been made before the five abductees arrived
in Japan."
Asahi Shimbun, Japan's second-biggest
daily newspaper, on the other hand, is blaming the Tokyo
government for the diplomatic mess, claiming that it did
not have any strategy whatsoever to deal with the
abduction issue beyond family-reunion parties in Japan.
There was, complained the paper, "a lack of
foresight on the part of Japanese diplomats who really
had no idea where they wanted the negotiating process to
go. Japan underestimated the anger of the North Koreans,
who believed they were double-crossed when Tokyo refused
to allow the abductees to go back to Pyongyang."
Tanaka, in fact, somehow saw the trouble coming
when his government at the end of October decided to
extend the deadline for putting the abductees back on a
plane to Pyongyang. "What will happen to the trust
between me and my counterpart in North Korea? Come up
with something else on the abductees," Tanaka reportedly
said, warning his government that the negotiations with
North Korea would "fall apart for good" if the
government did not return the abductees after the agreed
two weeks in Japan.
Fukuda confirmed that the
government had indeed no clue what to do if Pyongyang
claimed its "stolen property" back after the initial
deadline. "We only felt it was good to see them back at
that time. We came up with no idea about what we would
do after that," he admitted a few days ago.
Then
again, a plan on what do with the abductees beyond the
October deadline was not believed to be a priority in
the first place, since Pyongyang announced in September
that it might be willing to accept the permanent return
of the five and their relatives to Japan.
Not to
Pyongyang's recollection, of course, as the North
Koreans now feel betrayed and are claiming that the
Japanese government is playing dirty by not returning
"their" kidnapped Japanese.
And that's not all.
North Korea is now turning the tables on Japan, claiming
that the Japanese-turned-North Koreans are being held in
Japan against their will. According to Pyongyang, the
hapless abductees have in fact been kidnapped once again
- this time by the Japanese government.
This
claim is absurd even by North Koreans standards,
although turning reality upside down has been an
integral part of North Korean foreign policy for some
time, believes Victor Cha, director of the American
Alliances in Asia Project at Georgetown University in
Washington, DC. "It is very normal to see this sort of
behavior from the North, turning logic on its head.
North Korean negotiating tactics have always been along
these lines - make outrageous demands and work down from
these as bargaining chips."
Optimists inside and
outside Japan hope that Tokyo will eventually be able to
"buy" the abductees and their family members back even
if North Korea is tempted to make this "business" a
permanent source of income and foreign currency.
"I suspect that eventually the families will be
allowed to depart, probably for an undisclosed payment
by the Japanese, agreed to only with the condition of
confidentiality," believes Andrew Oros, assistant
professor of political science and international studies
at Washington College in Washington, DC. "However, there
are almost certainly more Japanese abductees in North
Korea and Pyongyang might merely testing the waters with
the first round to see how much this valuable 'human
bounty' is worth," he adds.
To the Japanese
government's relief, the five abductees, who for some
time remained unconvinced whether Japan was really and
once again their home, recently expressed their wish to
stay, urging the government to secure the right for
themselves and their children to remain for good.
It seems unlikely that the children will
emigrate to Japan just yet - Pyongyang has turned down
the request on the grounds that they are "in the middle
of their school term". But the abductees' go-ahead for
the Japanese government to take charge of reunifying the
families in Japan was nevertheless what Tokyo was
waiting for.
Back in October, televised
family-reunion parties were spoiled somewhat when some
of the abductees stepped in front of the cameras and
talked about returning to their kidnappers, jobs and
families as soon as the party was over. Their Japanese
relatives then stepped in, putting forward something
like a plea of insanity, and sent a petition to the
government urging it not to let the abductees go back to
North Korea.
The abduction issue has kept
hitting the headlines ever since and reporting has
became even more dramatic when family members got ready
to use force, tying up their loved ones in their homes
to keep them from leaving Japan. The government agreed
that the abductees must indeed have been brainwashed and
at the end of October decided not to let them return to
what had become their home more than 20 years ago.
Now, despite another diplomatic ice-time between
the two countries, Japan still wants Pyongyang to
investigate the whereabouts of up to 100 suspected
abductees who disappeared from Japan under mysterious
circumstances since the late 1970s. To speed up the
investigations, the Japanese government is planning to
question a former North Korean agent who was directly in
charge of "recruiting" Japanese language teachers. Kenki
Aoyama, an Osaka-born Korean who commuted between Japan
and North and South Korea during his career as a
Northern secret agent, defected to Japan in 1999 and has
recently agreed to testify in front of the Lower House
Foreign Affairs Committee dealing with the abduction
issue. If Aoyama's insider information turns out to be
useful, Japan might indeed have to get ready to shipping
tons of rice and cash to toward North Korea to get more
abductees on a one-way flight to Tokyo. It's diplomacy,
North Korean-style.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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