Japan-North Korea tension hangs over nuclear talks http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSPEK7063820070320
Tue Mar 20, 2007
SEOUL (Reuters) - Hostility between old foes North Korea and Japan overshadowed multilateral talks in China on dismantling the North's nuclear program on Tuesday as the two traded barbs and the United States urged tolerance.
North Korea accused Japan of trying to scuttle the six-party talks and said it did not want energy aid from Japan as a part of a deal to end Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program, its media reported.
"The DPRK does not care about whether Japan gives energy assistance to it or not because it would not affect much the DPRK's economic development," the North's official KCNA news agency said, using the initials for its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Japan has said it will not give full-scale economic aid to North Korea or establish diplomatic ties unless a feud over Japanese citizens kidnapped by Pyongyang in the 1970s and 1980s to train its spies is resolved.
The two are meant to be discussing how to formally set up diplomatic ties as part of a broader deal reached at six-party talks in February in which North Korea agreed to shut its main nuclear reactor in return for energy aid and security guarantees.
But they cut short their first bilateral talks, after wrangling over historical differences.
Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator to the six-party talks that group the two Korea, the United States, host China, Japan and Russia, said North Korea had wasted the opportunity to improve ties.
"Frankly, I felt that there could have been more done in the Japan-DPRK working group and I really feel that the DPRK ... ought to be looking to build a relationship with Japan," Hill told reporters.
"I must tell you, I just don't feel that dialogue is served by people walking out of meetings."
KCNA said the breakdown of the bilateral talks last month was due to: "The right-wing forces of Japan who do not want the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and the normalization of the bilateral relations."
Japan's top negotiator suggested to reporters that North Korea was holding up a planned meeting on Tuesday of chief delegates to the six-party talks. "I speculate that a certain country is unwilling again to do so," Kenichiro Sasae said in apparent reference to North Korea.
Impoverished North Korea, which depends on handouts from China and South Korea to feed its people and power its anemic economy, has wanted Japan ousted from the six-way talks.
It repeated its claim on Tuesday that the abduction issue had been solved and called on Japan to pay compensation and apologize for its brutal 1910-1945 rule over the Korean peninsula and forcing Korean women to work as sex slaves for Japan's troops.
"The DPRK strongly demands Japan stop talking about the 'abduction issue' but redeem the crimes committed by it in the past which are more horrendous than the issue and sincerely implement the agreement reached at the six-party talks," it said.
North Korea admitted in 2002 that its agents had abducted 13 Japanese. Five were repatriated. Japan has demanded the return of any survivors, but Pyongyang said the other eight are dead.
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