Japan urges US not to pursue GI desertion case

TOKYO -- The Japanese government has asked the United States to allow Charles Robert Jenkins, a GI who deserted to North Korea in 1965, to move to Japan without fear of prosecution, according to Japanese sources.

The request was made last week to Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, who was in Japan primarily to discuss concerns about North Korea's nuclear program and had been broached at lower levels.

The idea is to allow Jenkins, 63, to live in Japan with his Japanese wife, Hitomi Soga. She was abducted by North Korea decades ago, married Jenkins there, and was released more than a year ago.

Katsuei Hirasawa, a Japanese legislator who met with North Korean officials in December in Beijing, said they indicated that they wanted to send Jenkins and the couple's two daughters, ages 20 and 18, to Japan along with family members of other Japanese held in North Korea. But releasing Jenkins would put him in danger of arrest for desertion. The United States and Japan have an extradition treaty.

"If he is going to be prosecuted, Soga doesn't want him to come. And in that case, she might ask to go back to North Korea. . . . She loves her husband," Hirasawa said in an interview last week. "For that reason, we have through various official channels asked the US government to give a pardon to Jenkins."

Hirasawa said Japan appreciated the difficulty of pardoning a deserter -- especially one who crossed enemy lines to a country President Bush has deemed part of an "axis of evil" -- and will probably not press the case hard until the situation in Iraq is closer to a resolution. Over the weekend, Shinzo Abe, secretary general of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic party, met with Soga and others who had been abducted and taken to North Korea.

According to a report in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, Abe told Soga he had explained to Armitage that "it's important to create a condition so that [Jenkins] can come back to Japan. I hope that the United States will be considerate and have a generous thought on the arrangement."

An official at the US Embassy in Tokyo said that no agreement had been made and that the military would be unlikely to waive its right to prosecute Jenkins without talking to him about his life in North Korea.

Jenkins was a 24-year-old Army sergeant stationed in South Korea when he walked across the demilitarized zone. Little was seen or heard of him until October 2002, when the North Koreans admitted that they had, as alleged for years, abducted Japanese citizens. They said one of the Japanese abductees was married to Jenkins.