TOKYO: Relatives of South Koreans kidnapped by North Korea accused their own government of letting them down yesterday as Japan vowed to put the emotionally charged issue on the world agenda.
Speaking in the Japanese parliament, they said President Roh Moo-Hyun’s government has been too timid to demand the return of the kidnap victims outright as he purses reconciliation with the North.
“Our government is so timid that it cannot even call the abductions abductions,” Choi Song-Yong, who heads a national association of families of South Korean kidnap victims, told a special lower-house committee on the kidnap issue.
“I believe that North Korea has come to a point of no return on the abduction issue. It should make public all the facts,” said Choi, whose father was allegedly executed in the North after being kidnapped.
His group says it has helped four abductees escape the North and come home.
The five South Korean and Japanese relatives testified as the United States and Japan step up international pressure on the North over its nuclear arms ambitions, alleged money laundering and smuggling.
In 2002, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il admitted that his country had abducted 13 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s so they could train spies.
The row remains the main obstacle to normalizing relations, under which the impoverished North could expect major Japanese aid.
“The international community must step up the pressure on North Korea by taking up the abduction issue at the (Group of Eight) summit in July,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe told a breakfast meeting with the relatives.
“I want to emphasize that the abduction issue has spread internationally,” said the top government spokesman, tipped as the most favoured candidate to succeed Junichiro Koizumi as prime minister when he leaves office in September.
Choi U-Yong, another senior member of the families’ group, met Foreign Minister Taro Aso. She said Aso “promised the Japanese government would negotiate (with Pyongyang) on the proposition that the abductees are still alive.”
Seoul says North Korea is holding 487 South Koreans it snatched in the years following the 1950-53 Korean War as well as some 600 prisoners-of-war captured during the conflict. The North denies holding any South Koreans.
“The Roh Moo-Hyun government and the Chinese government should stop all kinds of assistance to the Kim Jong-Il government,” said former trade minister Takeo Hiranuma, who heads a Japanese parliamentarian group to rescue kidnap victims.
“Unfortunately, there is limited awareness in South Korea about the abduction issue and it has not been brought up at the national assembly,” Kim Young-Ja said at the breakfast meeting.
Kim is the elder sister of Kim Young-Nam, who was kidnapped in 1978 when he was 16 and is believed to have married a Japanese woman abductee, Megumi Yokota.
Yokota was kidnapped when she was a 13-year-old schoolgirl in 1977 and allegedly gave birth to a daughter whose DNA suggested links with the Yokota and Kim families.
Pyongyang says Yokota and seven other Japanese abductees were dead but Tokyo believes they were alive and kept under wraps as they know the North’s secrets.–AFP
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