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Japan, N Korean officials discuss normalizing ties

Japanese and North Korean negotiators met in northeast China yesterday to discuss normalizing ties, a Japanese official said, two months after Pyongyang promised to reinvestigate abductions of Japanese.

The talks, which were expected to last two days, began in Shenyang yesterday morning, an official at Japan’s consulate said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.

Akitaka Saiki, Japan’s top nuclear negotiator with North Korea, was leading the Japanese delegation at the talks, officials said.

The meeting, aimed at an eventual normalization of bilateral relations, is part of a working group set up under six-nation talks aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs.

North Korea has admitted kidnapping 13 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s. It has returned five victims and their families, while saying the eight others were dead.

But Japan insists that North Korea is hiding survivors and has abducted more people than it acknowledges.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice assured Japan that Washington would not immediately remove the North from its list of terror-sponsoring states, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said yesterday.

Rice made the assurance in a phone call with Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura yesterday morning, a ministry official said.

Yesterday was the soonest the US could remove North Korea from the list in exchange for disclosure of its nuclear programs in June.

In the conversation with Rice, Komura said North Korea had yet to specify how the US and others would verify Pyongyang’s dismantling of its nuclear weapons program, the ministry official said.

“Can I understand there will be no delisting on today, the 11th?” the official quoted Komura as asking.

“To that question, Rice said: ‘That’s right,’” the official said.
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