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North Korea: Japan prepares sanctions
noose
By Tom Tobback
 BEIJING -
Japanese lawmakers are expected to approve a bill on
Friday enabling the government to impose economic
sanctions on any country considered a threat to Japan's
security - read North Korea. The bill amends the Foreign
Exchange and Foreign Trade Control Law and would allow
Tokyo to halt trade, block cash remittances to North
Korea and even halt ferry service.
Sanctions are
not in the offing, as yet, but if imposed, they could
have a serious economic impact on the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Remittances alone
from pro-Pyongyang Koreans and Japanese in Japan are
said to amount to tens of billions of yen annually, a
major source of income for Pyongyang. Japan is also the
DPRK's third-largest trading partner, after China and
South Korea.
The possibility of sanctions,
however, represents important political leverage for
Tokyo against Pyongyang in the context of the current
nuclear crisis. But for Tokyo the leverage is even more
important in its efforts to resolve the case of a dozen
Japanese citizens and their families abducted by North
Korea in the 1970s. The best guess is that they were
abducted to train North Koreans, possibly espionage
agents, in Japanese language skills and behavior.
The abduction issue has been dominating
bilateral relations and preventing improvement since
DPRK leader Kim Jong-il admitted that 13 Japanese
citizens were abducted in the 1970s and five were still
alive in the DPRK. That was in 2002 during the historic
visit of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to Pyongyang.
Lawmakers in the Lower House of parliament, the
Diet, overwhelmingly approved the measure on January 29,
though the Japan Communist Party voted against it. On
Friday, overwhelming approval by the Upper House is
expected, clearing the way for the government to impose
sanctions.
Koizumi has said of the possible
economic sanctions, "It is good to have various cards"
to play in relations with North Korea, but he added that
his government is not yet considering actually applying
sanctions.
The DPRK Foreign Ministry called it a
"wanton violation" of the DPRK-Japan Pyongyang
Declaration of September 2002, warning: "As Japan sows,
so it shall reap."
Sanctions threat could
keep Pyongyang in talks
The possibility of
sanctions, however, will be an added incentive for
Pyongyang not to walk out of the recently agreed-upon
second round of six-party talks in Beijing on February
25 without making some kind of progress. Besides North
Korea, the talks will include South Korea, China, Japan,
Russia and the United States.
Japan is the
closest US ally in this standoff with Pyongyang, but
unlike the US, it is a significant trading partner of
the DPRK. North Korean exports include fish, marine
products and minerals; it imports machinery, electronics
and manufactured goods.
Under the sanctions,
Tokyo would be able to stop all bilateral trade, halt
the remittances to Pyongyang from DPRK sympathizers in
Japan, and impose other restrictions on the flow of
money and goods to and from North Korea. It could also
bar trips by the Mangyongbyon-92 ferry, the main direct
link between the two countries. Cargo shipping could
also be stopped.
Until 2002, Japan was the
DPRK's second-largest trading partner, after China.
Japan has lost this position to South Korea, which has
continued to expand its trade with the North despite the
current crisis. According to South Korean
Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) statistics for
2002, the DPRK's trade with Japan represented US$369
million, or 12 percent of its total foreign trade,
including inter-Korean trade.
In fact, in 2002
the DPRK exported more to Japan - $234 million worth -
than it imported - $135 million - while it ran huge
trade deficits with China and South Korea. In October
2003, one year after the nuclear crisis erupted, South
Korea reported that trade between Japan and the DPRK had
hit a record low of only $134 million over the first six
months of 2003.
Trade between Japan and the DPRK
has been facilitated by the presence of a large
ethnic-Korean community in Japan, and an equally
important source of income for Pyongyang is the
remittances these Koreans send back home. Of the 700,000
descendents of the Koreans who were not repatriated
after World War II, about one-third are said to support
the DPRK. These Chongryun (Chosen Soren in Japanese) are
organized in the General Association of Korean
Residents.
The organization had been running its
own network of schools and universities in relative
peace until September 2002, when Koizumi brought home
the news on the abductees after he returned from his
historic visit to Pyongyang. Right-wing Japanese groups
attacked several Chongryun-related offices, and it is
reported the Chongryun headquarters in Tokyo has been
put under constant police guard.
Koreans
under threat in Japan
Pyongyang calls the
association of Korean residents in Japan "a diplomatic
mission for friendship with the Japanese people in the
absence of formal diplomatic relations between the DPRK
and Japan", and it has strongly protested the right-wing
"terrorism" against Chongryun. As the crisis over the
abductions and nuclear threat worsens, Chongryun is
losing support among the Koreans in Japan, and the
organization is reportedly lowering its pro-Pyongyang
propaganda (tuning) in an effort to maintain
credibility.
There are no direct flights between
Japan and the DPRK; Chongryun's main link with the
socialist motherland is North Korea's Mangyongbyon-92
ferry that runs between the North Korean port of Wonsan
and Japan's port of Niigata. A few months after the
start of the nuclear crisis, Japanese police alleged
that the ship was being used as a communications
vehicle, engaged in espionage communications with DPRK
agents in Japan. Police later added accusations of
smuggling missile parts on the ferry.
When the
Mangyongbyon-92 scheduled its first visit to Japan last
June after the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome)
crisis, the Japanese authorities announced they would
inspect the ship upon arrival. In this move, Pyongyang
saw the beginning of sanctions, pushed by the United
States, and protested that the ferry had a purely
humanitarian mission: to allow Koreans in Japan to visit
the DPRK. The trip was canceled; one reason might have
been decision of the fuel supplier in Niigata to stop
servicing the DPRK vessel. Japan does not run a similar
ferry service.
The ferry eventually arrived in
Niigata on August 25, and 110 Japanese officers searched
the ship for seven hours - they found no contraband or
customs violations. They did find several safety
violations but gave a conditional permission to leave
the port, so as not to complicate the first round of
six-party talks that was scheduled two days later in
Beijing. During the next two visits to Niigata in
September and October, more than 500 police officers
were deployed to keep Japanese demonstrators at a
distance.
The main reason for this anti-DPRK
sentiment in Japan is the abduction issue, which turned
out to be a major obstacle to improving bilateral
relations after Koizumi's ground-breaking trip to
Pyongyang in September 2002. Kim Jong-il's admission
about the abducted Japanese was widely seen as a quid
pro quo for Japan's apology for its colonial rule
over Korea, paving the way for a huge compensation
package that Pyongyang is desperately
anticipating.
Koizumi underestimated abduction
issue
Koizumi, however, underestimated the
emotional reaction of the Japanese public, and the
abduction issue, which the DPRK regards as a closed
case, has since then dominated bilateral relations. The
five surviving abductees were allowed to return to
Japan, but their families remained in Pyongyang. Some
observers argue that Japanese society failed to place
this in the proper context and that the case of
abductees was by far outweighed by Japan's own wartime
crimes against Koreans.
The DPRK Foreign
Ministry said: "The Japanese authorities are making much
fuss about the issue of abduction of a few Japanese,
although they have not probed the truth behind hideous
human-rights abuses Japan committed against the Koreans
in the past and compensated for them."
When
Koizumi recently claimed Tok Islet (Takeshima in
Japanese) as Japanese territory, after Seoul decided to
publish a postage stamp showing this group of rocks,
Pyongyang saw this as proof of Japan's reviving
militarism and moves "for the re-invasion of Korea and
the rest of Asia", and mentioned it in the same breath
with Koizumi's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine on New
Year's Day. The shrine, a memorial to Japan's war dead,
is also considered to be a memorial to war criminals.
Making it legally possible to apply sanctions
against Pyongyang, Japan has chosen a path of
confrontation with the DPRK - a dramatic change from
Koizumi's bold initiative a year and a half ago to visit
Pyongyang to settle the issues of the past and start a
more constructive relationship. The DPRK has said it
will regard sanctions as a declaration of war, so Tokyo
will definitely think twice before applying such
sanctions to counter a threat to Japan's security.
Tom Tobback is the creator and editor
of Pyongyang Square, a website
dedicated to providing independent information on North
Korea. He is based in Beijing.
(Copyright
2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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