Abducting the abductees

The most recent talks between Japan and North Korea, which took place in Dalian, China, on Nov 23-24, were pretty much business as usual: Pyongyang is simply not interested in resuming negotiations on normalization of bilateral relations with Tokyo, nor in discussing security issues, nuclear weapons, or anything else.

The issue of kidnapped Japanese was also supposed to be on the agenda of the secret meeting, but on that subject, too, Pyongyang now seems less and less prepared to settle the issue for good.

In September during the Japanese-North Korean summit in Pyongyang, the North Korean government admitted that 15 Japanese citizens were abducted to North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s and "employed" teaching Japanese to North Korean secret agents. The five surviving abductees returned to Japan on Oct 15, but what was meant to be a two-week stay in Japan reacquainting themselves with their families might now turn out to be a permanent stay as far as the Japanese government is concerned.

In the bizarre logic that is the hallmark of any negotiations with Pyongyang, North Korea is complaining that Japan has abducted the abductees.

"Pyongyang wants its abductees back," was the message Japan's chief negotiator, Hitoshi Tanaka, director general of the Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, delivered to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi when he returned from Dalian. Koizumi was unimpressed and announced that Japan would continue to "negotiate patiently" even though Tanaka's North Korean counterpart had apparently long run out of patience.

The North Korean negotiator at the Dalian talks, who was described as a "secretive and powerful military officer close to Kim Jong Il," ignored Tanaka's efforts to set up anything resembling a dialogue, but came straight to the point when elaborating on North Korea's ways of dealing with diplomatic failure. "If you fail in these talks, at most you will lose your position. I have a pistol here to use on myself," was his straightforward contribution at the negotiation table.

After his announcement to take responsibility for the diplomatic mess on the spot, North Korea's official news agency took over, hammering out more of the usual belligerent rhetoric. "Japan's refusal to allow the five abduction victims to return to North Korea will result in serious consequences, including the indefinite postponement of security talks. Japan should allow the five abductees to return to North Korea, as promised, before their families go to Japan," the Korean Central News Agency railed.

What promise? "I can't remember having ever made such a promise," chief cabinet secretary Yasuo Fukuda said. "Our counterpart unilaterally understood that such a promise had been made before the five abductees arrived in Japan."

The Asahi Shimbun, Japan's second-biggest daily newspaper, on the other hand, is blaming the Tokyo government for the diplomatic mess, claiming that it did not have any strategy whatsoever to deal with the abduction issue beyond family-reunion parties in Japan.

There was, complained the paper, "a lack of foresight on the part of Japanese diplomats who really had no idea where they wanted the negotiating process to go. Japan underestimated the anger of the North Koreans, who believed they were double-crossed when Tokyo refused to allow the abductees to go back to Pyongyang."

Tanaka, in fact, somehow saw the trouble coming when his government at the end of October decided to extend the deadline for putting the abductees back on a plane to Pyongyang. "What will happen to the trust between me and my counterpart in North Korea? Come up with something else on the abductees," Tanaka reportedly said, warning his government that the negotiations with North Korea would "fall apart for good" if the government did not return the abductees after the agreed two weeks in Japan.

Fukuda confirmed that the government had indeed no clue what to do if Pyongyang claimed its "stolen property" back after the initial deadline. "We only felt it was good to see them back at that time. We came up with no idea about what we would do after that," he admitted a few days ago.

Then again, a plan on what do with the abductees beyond the October deadline was not believed to be a priority in the first place, since Pyongyang announced in September that it might be willing to accept the permanent return of the five and their relatives to Japan.

Not to Pyongyang's recollection, of course, as the North Koreans now feel betrayed and are claiming that the Japanese government is playing dirty by not returning "their" kidnapped Japanese.

And that's not all. North Korea is now turning the tables on Japan, claiming that the Japanese-turned-North Koreans are being held in Japan against their will. According to Pyongyang, the hapless abductees have in fact been kidnapped once again - this time by the Japanese government.

This claim is absurd even by North Koreans standards, although turning reality upside down has been an integral part of North Korean foreign policy for some time, believes Victor Cha, director of the American Alliances in Asia Project at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. "It is very normal to see this sort of behavior from the North, turning logic on its head. North Korean negotiating tactics have always been along these lines - make outrageous demands and work down from these as bargaining chips."

Optimists inside and outside Japan hope that Tokyo will eventually be able to "buy" the abductees and their family members back even if North Korea is tempted to make this "business" a permanent source of income and foreign currency.

"I suspect that eventually the families will be allowed to depart, probably for an undisclosed payment by the Japanese, agreed to only with the condition of confidentiality," believes Andrew Oros, assistant professor of political science and international studies at Washington College in Washington, DC. "However, there are almost certainly more Japanese abductees in North Korea and Pyongyang might merely testing the waters with the first round to see how much this valuable 'human bounty' is worth," he adds.

To the Japanese government's relief, the five abductees, who for some time remained unconvinced whether Japan was really and once again their home, recently expressed their wish to stay, urging the government to secure the right for themselves and their children to remain for good.

It seems unlikely that the children will emigrate to Japan just yet - Pyongyang has turned down the request on the grounds that they are "in the middle of their school term." But the abductees' go-ahead for the Japanese government to take charge of reunifying the families in Japan was nevertheless what Tokyo was waiting for.

Back in October, televised family-reunion parties were spoiled somewhat when some of the abductees stepped in front of the cameras and talked about returning to their kidnappers, jobs and families as soon as the party was over. Their Japanese relatives then stepped in, putting forward something like a plea of insanity, and sent a petition to the government urging it not to let the abductees go back to North Korea.

The abduction issue has kept hitting the headlines ever since and reporting has became even more dramatic when family members got ready to use force, tying up their loved ones in their homes to keep them from leaving Japan. The government agreed that the abductees must indeed have been brainwashed and at the end of October decided not to let them return to what had become their home more than 20 years ago.

Now, despite another diplomatic ice-time between the two countries, Japan still wants Pyongyang to investigate the whereabouts of up to 100 suspected abductees who disappeared from Japan under mysterious circumstances since the late 1970s.

To speed up the investigations, the Japanese government is planning to question a former North Korean agent who was directly in charge of "recruiting" Japanese language teachers. Kenki Aoyama, an Osaka-born Korean who commuted between Japan and North and South Korea during his career as a Northern secret agent, defected to Japan in 1999 and has recently agreed to testify in front of the Lower House Foreign Affairs Committee dealing with the abduction issue.

If Aoyama's insider information turns out to be useful, Japan might indeed have to get ready to shipping tons of rice and cash to toward North Korea to get more abductees on a one-way flight to Tokyo. It's diplomacy, North Korean-style.