Japan, N. Korea fail to end dispute over kidnappings

TOKYO -- Japan and North Korea failed to resolve a decades-old dispute over kidnapped Japanese during talks in Pyongyang, a Japanese official said yesterday.

Five Japanese diplomats flew to Pyongyang on Wednesday, two weeks before a second round of six-way negotiations in Beijing over North Korea's nuclear arms program. But the diplomats returned to Tokyo after their surprise four-day visit with little to show for their efforts.

"It didn't reach the point of attaining specific results at all," a senior official at the Japanese Foreign Ministry said.

He said the two sides agreed to continue official bilateral talks on the abduction issue but added that nothing specific about the date or format was decided.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il acknowledged at a historic September 2002 summit with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that Pyongyang had kidnapped 13 Japanese in the 1970s and '80s to help train spies.

North Korea said it had cautioned Japan in last week's talks not to take up the abduction issue at the next six-way talks.

"It said if the Japanese side raises again the abduction issue at the next round of the six-way talks, the DPRK side will resolutely shut out Japan's participation in the talks . . . and this will bring everything to a collapse," a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said in comments carried by North Korea's official KCNA news agency.

DPRK refers to the country's official name, Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Abduction is an emotional topic in Japan, which says resolution of the issue is a prerequisite for establishing diplomatic ties with North Korea.

The Japanese official said that on the nuclear issue, North Korea had said it would be important to see how participants at the six-party talks led by the United States react to its proposal to freeze its nuclear program.

The Japanese side said such a proposal could be discussed if North Korea clearly disclosed its nuclear-related activities, including uranium enrichment, but the North Korean side said only that it was not engaging in such activities, the official said.

In the talks Friday with North Korea's vice foreign minister, Kang Sok Ju, Japan demanded that Pyongyang allow seven children of five Japanese nationals who were abducted in the 1970s and returned home in October 2002 to come to Japan to be reunited with their parents.

Tokyo also wants Charles Jenkins, a US soldier who Washington says defected to North Korea and who is married to one of the five abductees, to be allowed to rejoin his wife.

A North Korean decision to allow the eight to come to Japan could pave the way toward normalization, which could clear the route for Japanese economic aid to the impoverished state.