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Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda failed to win assurances that Washington will not remove North Korea from the list when he met with U.S. President George W. Bush in Washington earlier this month. Fukuda, on his first visit abroad after taking office in September, wanted to win a firm commitment from Bush that Washington would not remove North Korea from the list until the country resolved the cases of all Japanese citizens kidnapped by its agents in the 1970s and 1980s. However, Bush reportedly said merely that the United States would not forget the Japanese abductees.
Analysts predict that the president will send a recommendation to Congress within this year and that Pyongyang will be removed from the terrorism blacklist early next year.
Under an agreement signed Oct. 3 during six-party talks in Beijing, Pyongyang promised to disable its Yongbyon nuclear reactor, fuel reprocessing plants and a fuel fabrication plant. It also pledged to provide a complete list of all its nuclear programs by Dec. 31. In exchange, the United States was to take steps toward removing the communist regime from its list of terrorism sponsoring states, among other things.
The recent dramatic change in the Bush administration's stance toward North Korea is throwing Japan off balance, as the conciliatory U.S. line stands in marked contrast to Japan's hard-line policies against the country.
When former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Pyongyang in 2002, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il admitted that his country's agents had abducted 13 Japanese citizens decades earlier. Five have since returned to Japan, while eight remain missing. Abductee support groups suspect that at least 100 Japanese were kidnapped, however.
Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who mustered public support through his hard line on the abduction issue, went even further when he invoked unilateral economic sanctions after North Korea conducted a test of a nuclear device in October last year.
Since there has been no progress on the abduction issue, Fukuda has been forced to maintain the hard-line policies he inherited, although he has also emphasized the necessity of dialogue in dealing with North Korea.
"The U.S. will send a notice to Congress to remove the North from the list around Christmas and carry it into effect around next February. This time schedule would have been fixed," said Terumasa Nakanishi, a scholar in international politics at Kyoto University.
According to Nakanishi, amid the quicksand of the Iraq War the Bush administration is eager to score diplomatic points before leaving office in early 2009. Progress on North Korea would serve this purpose, and removing the country from the blacklist would be a relatively easy step.
The Japanese abductees' families, however, see the move as the beginning of a nightmare, as it would support Pyongyang's claim that the issue has already been resolved.
Bush welcomed Sakie Yokota, mother of Megumi Yokota, and her son to the Oval Office in April last year. Megumi Yokota was abducted at age 13 in 1977 and has become a symbol of the abductee issue in Japan. The extremely rare presidential meeting greatly encouraged the victims' families, but recent moves have disappointed them and heightened their anxiety.
"The United States is not interested in the abduction issue and they see that Japan has no option to oppose the U.S. policy," said Nakanishi. If Washington takes North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terrorism, it could then insist that the abduction issue is a matter for Japan and North Korea to resolve, he said. This could lead to debate in Japan over the validity of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, Nakanishi said, adding that ultimately "Japan would have to consider nuclear armament."
Nakanishi feels that current U.S. policy, which stresses North Korea's denuclearization, plays down the importance of the U.S. alliance with Japan. However, other experts on the issue suggest that removal from the list would strengthen North Korea's ties with the world, and could advance the abduction issue.
"Since economic sanctions have not caused regime change, the more realistic strategy is to lead them to shift to a route of reform and liberalization and not to make them backslide. The North understands that it has to resolve the abduction issue at some stage to normalize diplomatic relations with Japan for its economic reconstruction," said Lee Young Hwa, a professor at Kansai University and a leader of the Osaka-based group Rescue the North Korean People! Urgent Action Network.
Lee also predicts that Washington will drop North Korea from its list of terrorism sponsors at the beginning of next year, but thinks this could open the way for further discussion on the abduction issue. He said there are differences between the U.S and Japanese positions, but both hope for an early resolution of the issue. He said the United States understands that its alliance with Japan would fall apart if it ignored the abduction issue altogether.
Removal from the list will bring a number of benefits to the isolated communist country. It would open the way for it to receive economic support form international financial institutions without U.S. opposition, and release assets frozen under the U.S. Trading with the Enemy Act, estimated at about US$30 million. Japan's economic sanctions would thus have less impact.
"If Japan makes a larger-than-expected objection to U.S. steps toward removing the North from the list, there are possibilities that the U.S. could cancel its moves toward diplomatic normalization by raising suspicions that the North supported the establishment of nuclear facilities in Syria," said Nakanishi. "But if Japan's opposition is temporary, the U.S. would normalize diplomatic relations with the North by next summer."
Six-party talks on the disablement of North Korea's nuclear programs are due to reopen in Beijing in early December. The communist regime has agreed to give a full declaration of its nuclear activities by the end of this year, but whether or not it will make a full declaration is in some doubt.
"In diplomatic negotiations with the North, no country, even South Korea, has brought results only through dialogue," pointed out Toshio Miyatsuka, a North Korea specialist at Yamanashi Gakuin University. He predicts, "There will be many problems in the months ahead."
