Seoul and Tokyo join hands over
abductions By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - A carefully chosen line buried in
a joint North-South Korean ministers' statement
masks one of the deepest lingering tragedies of
the Korean War - and the frustration in efforts to
do anything about it.
The two sides, says
point six in the eight-point statement that came
out of three days of talks in Pyongyang this week,
"agreed to cooperate in resolving the issue of the
people unaccounted for during or after the Korean
War in a practical manner".
Those bland
words hide the tragedy of 542 former South Korean
soldiers whom South Korea reports as held in North
Korea since
the
Korean War as well as 486 civilians, mostly
fishermen, abducted to the North in more than half
a century since the war ended.
So deep are
the wounds that, for once, South Korea and Japan
are finding common cause. The immediate reason is
in an uproar over the South Korean husband of
kidnapped Japanese schoolgirl Megumi Yokota and
the daughter they're said to have had in North
Korea.
The case hit the headlines here and
in Japan after DNA evidence showed that the South
Korean man and Yokota had been married and were
the parents of the girl. Yokota was 13 when she
was kidnapped as she walked home from school in
1977 and died in captivity, as acknowledged by
North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il when he met with
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in 2002
in Pyongyang.
She was forced to marry Kim
Young-nam, a South Korean who was spirited to
North Korea after having been kidnapped off a
beach in South Korea in 1978, according to
visitors to North Korea, and they had a daughter
named Kim Hye-gyong.
DNA obtained from
relatives of Kim Young-nam and from Kim Hye-gyong
herself when she was visited by an official team
from Japan in 2004 proves the blood relationship
of the daughter to Yokota, according to the
Japanese, who sent a sample of the girl's blood to
Korea.
The whole case "shows once again
the inhuman acts to which North Korea will stoop",
editorialized the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun,
Japan's largest newspaper. "Without showing the
least sincerity in working toward a resolution of
the abduction issue North Korea has repeatedly
made false explanations on all aspects of the
matter."
For that reason, the newspaper
concluded, "The Japanese government needs to work
closer with South Korea in investigating the
contemptible state terrorism of North Korea."
So far, all North Korean officials have
said is that Yokota's husband worked for a
"special organization". He reportedly lives with
his daughter, both under house arrest, on the
outskirts of Pyongyang.
Koizumi, buffeted
by rising anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea,
clearly sees the DNA furor as a way to distract
Korean outrage over, most recently, the
near-confrontation between Japanese survey vessels
and the South Korean Navy around the cluster of
islets midway between Korea and Japan known as
Tokdo in Korea, Takeshima in Japan.
The
island controversy, though not likely to flare
into a shooting war, seems certain to bubble on in
the aftermath of a face-saving compromise in which
Japan canceled plans to survey the waters around
the islets, safely in Korean hands, while South
Korea promised not to try to persuade
international map makers to put Korean names on
undersea formations around them.
The
question now is what cause is likely to arouse
deeper emotional sentiments here - the need to
defend sacred Korean soil, however far into the
sea and unpopulated, against Japanese encroachment
or the yearning for the return of upwards of 1,000
South Koreans still held captive in North Korea.
South Korea and Japan, at the highest
levels, clearly prefer to focus on different
issues. South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun had
nothing to say on Tuesday about prisoners held in
North Korea while declaring Korea's "God-given
right" to give Korean names to formations around
the islands and promising to react "strongly and
sternly against any physical provocation" from
Japan.
The Japanese, sticking to their
guns, rhetorically, about their legal right to the
islands, hope the DNA bond between a South Korean
held in North Korea and a Japanese woman will move
South Koreans emotionally to Japan's side on North
Korea.
Koizumi, also the target of Korean
wrath over his visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine,
which honors Japan's war dead, including war
criminals, as well as skewed versions of Japan's
imperial history and role in World War II in
textbooks, has called for "more cooperation with
South Korea" on the abduction issue since "South
Korea has more people believed to be abducted than
Japan".
North Korea has returned to Japan
five people Pyongyang admits were abducted. North
Korean leader Kim Jong-il says the kidnappers
acted without authorization. The Japanese believe
at least eight more were kidnapped.
Shinzo
Abe, Japan's chief cabinet secretary, who strongly
defended the right of Japanese survey vessels to
scour the waters around the islets before the
vessels turned back, has said South Korea wanted
to conduct its own DNA tests and "Japan would like
to cooperate".
Mothers on both sides have
added their tearful agreement in televised news
conferences. Yokota's mother, Sakei Yokota, has
said South Korea had been "little interested in
the issue" but "from now on South Korea should
work hard to solve the issue".
In South
Korea, Kim Young-nam's 82-year-old mother, Choi
Gye-won, said, "My wish before I die" is to see
her son and "my granddaughter too".
It was
up to Vice Unification Minister Shin Un-sang to
show his government's concern despite its
reluctance to offend the North with harsh
criticism.
The government had "a strong
determination to resolve the issue of South Korean
POWs [prisoners of war] and abductees even if it
will have to pay costs such as providing economic
aid to North Korea", he said. He waffled, however,
on how and when, saying there were still no
"concrete plans as to how" to go about achieving
that goal.
Unification Minister Lee
Jong-seok, who led South Korea's delegation to
Pyongyang last weekend, may have made a tactical
point by holding off on agreeing to North Korea's
demands for massive aid - 500,000 tons of rice and
300,000 tons of fertilizer.
The
eight-point final statement, a masterpiece of
vagueness, also called for fulfilling the
agreement, reached at six-party talks in
September, for North Korea to give up its nuclear
weapons program in exchange for discussion of
provision of energy for North Korea "at an
appropriate time". North Korea refused, though, to
agree to return to the table.
The wording
of the phrase about looking into "those
unaccounted for" was equally vague, avoiding any
reference to those held in North Korea as
abductees or kidnap victims, much less as
prisoners from the Korean War.
Under the
circumstances, inclusion of any reference to the
issue, however veiled, may be seen as a success
from the viewpoint of allaying criticism that
South Korea is not doing enough on behalf of its
people.
Still unanswered is why the North
Koreans put Kim Young-nam and Megumi Yokota
together.
Charles Jenkins, the US military
deserter who defected to North Korea, married a
Japanese woman who had been kidnapped to the North
and eventually freed with their two daughters
after she had already been allowed to return to
Japan, believes North Korean authorities may have
wanted them to build a school for spies.
Then, he told reporters in Japan, "I guess
they wanted a child."
Journalist
Donald Kirk has been in and out of Korea
since 1972.
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