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Japan, N.Korea Red Cross open humanitarian talks

BEIJING: Red Cross officials from Japan and North Korea met in Beijing on Monday for talks on bilateral humanitarian issues in what Tokyo has called the first step in efforts to establish diplomatic relations.

The negotiations were expected to focus on the fate of Japanese citizens Tokyo says were kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1960s and 1970s and Japanese women who married North Koreans and moved to the Stalinist state four decades ago.

The Beijing talks began as Japan considered resuming food aid to famine-hit North Korea for the first time in more than two years. Tokyo has made it clear that a resumption of aid depends on progress in normalising ties.

The issue of the missing Japanese citizens, which scuttled normalisation talks at the start of the 1990s, remains one of the stickiest points hampering progress in forging diplomatic ties between the two.

The Japanese were apparently kidnapped to teach Japanese to potential North Korean spies. Reports of the kidnappings have come from testimony by North Korean defectors to the South. Pyongyang denies any such abductions.

Japanese media quoted Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi as saying in Tokyo on Monday the Red Cross talks were "extremely important" for normalisation of ties with North Korea.

"I'm not optimistic about it, but I have hopes for it," Kyodo news agency quoted Obuchi as telling reporters.

The talks between delegations headed by Japan Red Cross Society vice-president Tadateru Konoe and North Korean counterpart Ho Hae-ryong opened a week after families of alleged Japanese abductees held a sit-in to protest against Tokyo's plan to resume food aid to its Stalinist neighbour.

About 50 people gathered in front of Japan's Foreign Ministry demanding the government not give food to a country which had shown no willingness to discuss the abduction issue.

Government sources have said Tokyo may give 100,000 tonnes of rice to Pyongyang through the United Nations to try to bring North Korea back to the negotiating table.

Officials said last week the government was in the final stages of discussions on the food aid issue with the ruling coalition parties, but a decision had not yet been finalised.

Japan suspended all food aid to Pyongyang after North Korea fired a rocket over Japan's main Honshu island and into the Pacific Ocean in August 1998. It hopes engagement with the Pyongyang regime can help defuse the threat of future launches.

At the same time, analysts say Japan is keen to keep in step with the United States and South Korea in gradually improving relations with North Korea.

Japan and North Korea held a first round of preparatory talks in Beijing in December, when Red Cross officials from the two countries reached a breakthrough agreement on food aid and other humanitarian issues.

In the talks, Japan Red Cross delegates promised to press their government to resume food aid to North Korea. In return, North Korean Red Cross officials promised to urge Pyongyang to cooperate in an investigation of missing Japanese.

After years of angrily denying any such problem existed, Pyongyang said through the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) last week the North Korean Red Cross had ordered a "restart of the investigation into the 'missing persons'".

Japan, which annexed and colonised the Korean peninsula from 1910-45, established diplomatic ties with capitalist South Korea in 1965, but it has yet to do so with the communist North. -Reuters