Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Japan's sanctions would be war declaration: N Korea
Reuters Tokyo, December 15
North Korea warned Japan on Wednesday it would treat its economic sanctions as a "declaration of war" and threatened to press for the exclusion of Tokyo from six-party talks on Pyongyang's nuclear arms programmes.
The move came amid growing calls from the Japanese public for the government to slap sanctions on North Korea after Tokyo said bones Pyongyang had handed over as those of kidnapped Japanese, were from other people.
"If sanctions are applied against the DPRK (North Korea) due to the moves of the ultra-right forces, we will regard it as a declaration of war against our country and promptly react to the action by an effective physical method," a spokesman for North Korea's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
North Korea handed over the bones at talks in Pyongyang in November, saying they were the remains of Megumi Yokota and Kaoru Matsuki, two of 13 Japanese whom Pyongyang has admitted abducting in the 1970s and 1980s to teach its spies about Japan.
But the North Korean spokesman said it was "unimaginable" that the bones handed over by the husband of Yokota were not hers.
"Let's suppose he handed the remains of other person to the Japanese side, as claimed by it, then what did he expect from doing so?" the spokesman said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, monitored in Tokyo.
Japanese media polls showed a majority of Japanese citizens were in favour of economic sanctions on North Korea.
The North Korean spokesman said Pyongyang might call for the exclusion of Japan from talks on its nuclear programmes involving North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
"We will seriously reconsider the issue of taking part in the six-party talks together with Japan as long as such premeditated and provocative campaign of the ultra-right forces against the DPRK goes on," he said.
Three rounds of six-party talks have made little progress. A fourth round set for September did not materialise.
© HT Media Ltd. 2004.