Japan insists on progress in abduction issue with North Korea

Mar 9, 2007, 8:27 GMT

Tokyo - Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso reiterated Friday that Tokyo will oppose providing energy assistance to North Korea unless Pyongyang cooperates in resolving the abduction issue.

The issue of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s and '80s was blamed for the failure to make progress at a bilateral working group meeting that ended Thursday in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi.

Before a meeting Friday with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Aso said at a press conference that Japan would insist on discussing the Japanese abductee issue within the framework of six-party talks on North Korean nuclear policy and not at a separate meeting.

'The important thing is that the talks were not done bilaterally (separate from the nuclear issue) but as part of the six-party talks,' Aso said. 'The crucial point of the six-party talks is that all six countries will come up with a unified response.'

The minister said he was not concerned that the Tokyo-Pyongyang talks may be lagging behind the other working groups, which were set up at six-party negotiations in Beijing with a mandate to dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.

The US-North Korea working group meeting seemed to see some progress.

Aso also warned that Japan should 'not fall into (North Korea's) trap,' an apparent reference to North Korea's alleged efforts to isolate Japan.

The two-day meeting between Japanese and North Korean officials in Hanoi failed to make progress on any concrete measures to resolve the abductee cases, which Japan has insisted on as a precondition in normalizing diplomatic ties.

The North Korean negotiator at the talks called Japan's position 'unreasonable' because all the unreturned abductees were dead.

In Hanoi, Japan requested a reinvestigation into the whereabouts of its missing citizens who were kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s.

Pyongyang countered by saying that all the abduction cases were closed and there was nothing else it could do.