[whiteperil] Sean: Abductee issue still on the table

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Posted by Sean:
Abductee issue still on the table
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1214419229.shtml


   The Yomiuri [1]prints an AP story relating that President Bush has
   promised not to forget the importance of the abductee issue to the
   Japanese:

     U.S. President George W. Bush told Japan's premier Wednesday he
     understands Tokyo's concern about Japanese citizens kidnapped by
     North Korea.
     Bush telephoned Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and told him that he
     "would not forget the abduction issue," said a statement from
     Japan's Foreign Ministry.
     The 20-minute phone conversation came a day before North Korea is
     expected to provide a list of its nuclear activities, a process
     that could lead to taking Pyongyang off Washington's terrorism and
     sanctions blacklists in exchange for the regime giving up its
     nuclear weapons program.
     North Korea's abduction of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 80s
     is a high-profile issue here, and Tokyo has long pushed for the
     resolution of the abductions as a condition for providing aid and
     improved relations to the communist nation.
     Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura on Tuesday suggested that
     Tokyo would not want Pyongyang taken off the U.S. terrorism
     blacklist until the abductions were resolved.
     Komura is expected to voice Tokyo's concern during talks with U.S.
     Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is to visit Japan Thursday
     for a Group of Eight foreign ministers' meeting.

   Japan has been frustrated with the DPRK denuclearization talks because
   the abductee issue is consistently back-burnered. The Bush
   administration has regularly [2]expressed [3]sympathy with the
   families of abductees, and, of course, kidnapping of civilians is an
   act of aggression. But it's not surprising that the DPRK hasn't given
   Japan any real satisfaction on most of them. Their records may just
   have disappeared or not been kept systematically in the first place,
   and who knows how methodically the corpses of those now dead were
   processed.

References

   1. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_GEN_JAPAN_US_NORTH_KOREA_ASOL-?SITE=YOMIURI&SECTION=HOSTED_ASIA&TEMPLATE=ap_national.html
   2. http://whiteperil.com/posts/1146404876.shtml
   3. http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:pkaMth401q4J:whiteperil.com/posts/chain_1142513355.shtml+megumi+yokota&hl=ja&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us