Japan puts more pressure on North
Korea By Hisane Masaki
TOKYO - In a significant move aimed at
ratcheting up pressure on North Korea, Japan's
diet (parliament) is expected to enact on Friday
the North Korean Human Rights Act, which calls for
economic sanctions against Pyongyang unless
progress is made on the country's human-rights
situation, including finally resolving the issue
of abductions of Japanese nationals.
The
proposed law - which is "99.9%" assured of
passage, observers say - would require the
government to impose economic sanctions against
North Korea if no progress is made on the
abductions and other human-rights issues. It also
contains a provision calling for support for North
Korean defectors.
The bill specifically
refers to the possibility of invoking two laws
that were revised or newly enacted in 2004. One is
the Foreign
Exchange and Foreign Trade
Law, which allows the government to halt trade and
block cash remittances to North Korea - or to any
other country - based on its own judgment, even
without a United Nations resolution calling for
such sanctions.
Another is a newly enacted
law that authorizes the government to ban the
docking of North Korean ships or ships that have
visited North Korea at Japanese ports. Among the
most likely target would be the Mangyongbyon-92
Ferry, the main direct link between the two
countries, running between the North Korean port
of Wonsan and Japan's port of Niigata.
Pyongyang has often warned that economic
sanctions would be tantamount to a "declaration of
war". And it is true that North Korea would suffer
if Japan actually imposed them. Until 2002, Japan
was North Korea's second-largest trading partner
after China, facilitated in part by the large
ethnic-Korean community in Japan. However, the
two-way trade has shrunk considerably in recent
years, reflecting increasingly tense ties. Japan
has fallen behind China, South Korea and Thailand.
On the day the Japanese House of
Representatives approved the bill, Pyongyang
warned Tokyo against pressing too hard on the
abduction issue and called on Japan to pay
compensation for abuses Koreans suffered during
the years of Japanese colonial rule. The North
Korean Foreign Ministry reiterated in a statement
that the abduction issue has already been settled,
alleging that Japan aims to "isolate [North Korea]
by taking advantage of the hostile US policy
toward it".
The North Korean Human Rights
Act comes amid myriad tensions with Pyongyang on a
variety of issues. There is, of course, the
burning question of how deal with North Korea's
nuclear-weapons program. There is the matter of
Pyongyang's printing counterfeit US$100 bills.
More recently, US intelligence has detected signs
that North Korea may be preparing to test an
intercontinental ballistic missile. Any such test
would almost certainly violate Japan's airspace.
None of these issues, however, touch
Japanese people as deeply as the kidnapping of
some of their citizens, some mere teenage girls,
in the 1970s and 1980s. Visiting Pyongyang in
September 2002, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi
got Dear Leader Kim Jong-il to admit that North
Korean agents had, indeed, kidnapped some Japanese
in that period. As far as North Korea is
concerned, 13 were abducted and eight died: all
are accounted for; case closed.
The
Japanese remain unconvinced, suspecting that some
of the eight Pyongyang says have died may still be
alive and that other kidnap victims are yet to be
tallied. The poster child for Japan is Megumi
Yokota, who was abducted in 1977 when she was just
13 and thus would be in her mid-40s now. Pyongyang
claims she is one of the eight who died, and in
November 2004 handed over her ashes. Japanese DNA
analysis found that the ashes could not have
belonged to Yokota. The idea that Pyongyang handed
over someone else's ashes stirred an outcry in
Japan.
The Yokota family continues to keep
the issue bubbling before the public and to hold
the government's feet to the fire. Sakie Yokota,
the 70-year-old mother of Megumi, recently visited
the United States, where she met President George
W Bush and members of Congress. She got heartfelt
sympathy and full support for her cause from
everyone. Bush said he was very deeply moved,
called North Korea a "heartless country" and
pledged to work for freedom there.
The US,
for its part, has enacted its own North Korea
Human Rights Act. Among other things, it
specifically requires the US to grant asylum to
North Koreans who escape from their country.
Washington granted refugee status to six people
under the act early last month, the first time it
had accepted North Korean refugees.
In
mid-December, the United Nations General Assembly
adopted a resolution criticizing and expressing
serious concern over North Korea's human-rights
situation, including abductions of foreigners. It
was the first time that the assembly had adopted a
resolution specifically citing North Korea's
human-rights violations.
Japan had hoped
to get more moral support from South Korea on the
abduction issue when it was learned that Megumi
Yokota's husband may have been a South Korean also
kidnapped by the North in 1978 when he was 16.
Officials came to this conclusion through more DNA
tests, this time on Megumi Yokota's daughter and
the relatives of her presumed South Korean father
Kim Young-nam. They concluded that the Southerner
very likely fathered the daughter.
South
Korea says 486 of its citizens abducted or
detained by the North are still living there. It
says North Korea is also holding 542 others taken
prisoner during the Korean War. Pyongyang denies
holding any prisoners of war and claims the
civilians defected voluntarily. But the abduction
issue has not had as high a media profile in South
Korea as in Japan. Seoul is focused
single-mindedly on detente with the North.
The recent findings about the very likely
blood relationship between Kim Young-nam and
Megumi Yokota's daughter Kim Hae-kyong, 18, have
raised hopes in Japan of forging a unified front
between Tokyo and Seoul over the abduction issue.
In mid-May, Shigeru Yokota, the 73-year-old father
of Megumi Yokota, visited Choi Gye-wol, the
78-year-old mother of Kim Young-nam, in Seoul.
Later that month, Choi visited the parents of
Megumi Yokota - Shigeru and Sakie - in Tokyo and
met with Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe.
But early this month North Korea took an
unusual step seen by many in Japan as a bid to
drive a wedge between Tokyo and Seoul by appeasing
South Korean public opinion over the issue. North
Korea announced that the whereabouts of Kim
Young-nam has been confirmed, without saying how
he got into the country. And citing
"humanitarianism", Pyongyang said it has decided
to arrange his reunion with his mother, Choi, at
the North's Diamond Mountain resort during a round
of reunions of families divided by the
inter-Korean border this month.
Japan
fears that North Korea might be seeking to draw
the curtain on the Megumi Yokota case by having
Kim Young-nam tell his mother that Megumi had
already died, as Pyongyang has claimed. He may
even deny that he was the husband of Megumi
Yokota.
To be sure, with the enactment of
the North Korea Human Rights Bill, Japan will get
a new diplomatic card to play in dealing with the
Stalinist state. But the bill does not specify how
progress would be assessed or set a deadline for
imposing sanctions, leaving a decision on whether
to slap on sanctions to the discretion of the
government. "The government will take into
consideration international trends
comprehensively," the bill says. Prime
Minister Koizumi has been cautious about imposing
sanctions against North Korea. There is even
speculation that he might visit Pyongyang again
before stepping down in September, when his
current term as party president - and hence as
premier - expires. But if Abe, an anti-North Korea
hardliner and the front-runner in the race to
succeed Koizumi, takes the helm of government, the
possibility of Japan invoking sanctions will grow.
In fact, after the last high-level
negotiations between Tokyo and Pyongyang - held in
Beijing in February to discuss nuclear, abduction
and normalization issues - failed to make any
progress, Japan got tougher. At Abe's behest, the
Japanese government ministries and agencies
concerned have begun enforcing the existing laws
as strictly as possible against North Korea to
crack down on illegal exports there, including
those made via third countries, and illicit
financial transactions such as laundering of
profits from drug smuggling.
Abe also has
orchestrated increased taxes on facilities owned
across the country by the General Association of
Korean Residents in Japan - or Chosen Soren - a
pro-Pyongyang group that acts as North Korea's de
facto embassy in the absence of diplomatic ties.
In March, police raided the Osaka office of the
group as part of investigations into the abduction
of one of 16 Japanese citizens certified by the
Japanese government to have been abducted by North
Korean agents.
Hisane Masaki is
a Tokyo-based journalist, commentator and scholar
on international politics and economy; his e-mail
address is yiu45535@nifty.com.
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