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NKorea says Japan wants to wreck six-party talks
2007-03-19
North Korea on Tuesday accused Japan of trying to sabotage this week's six-party nuclear talks in Beijing and said it does not need the aid which Tokyo has pledged to withhold. The comments carried by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) came a day after North Korea's chief delegate in Beijing renewed a call for Japan to be excluded from the six-nation negotiations. The forum, on scrapping the North's nuclear programme in exchange for economic and diplomatic benefits, also aims to lay the foundations for a permanent peace in Northeast Asia. It groups the two Koreas, the United States, host China, Japan and Russia. But rare one-on-one talks between North Korea and Japan broke down in acrimony earlier this month in Vietnam, after Tokyo pressed Pyongyang for answers about Japanese abducted by the communist state during the Cold War. Until the kidnapping issue is settled, Japan refuses to help fund a February 13 agreement under which North Korea will receive badly needed economic aid in return for disabling its nuclear programmes. The breakdown of the Hanoi talks "is an inevitable product of the deliberate moves of the present ruling quarters and the right-wing forces of Japan who do not want the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and the normalisation of the bilateral relations," said KCNA. The state news agency said North Korea "has never asked Japan for any assistance and it has no idea of getting any help from it, either." KCNA instead called on Japan, which occupied the Korean peninsula from 1910-45, "to apologise and compensate for the crimes committed by it against the Korean people in the past." It added: "The hideous crimes committed by Japan against humanity should be settled as a separate issue." KCNA described Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as the grandson of a Class A war criminal and Foreign Minister Taro Aso as "a descendant of the Asos who forcibly took Koreans to coal mines, forcing them to do slave labour." North Korea has acknowledged kidnapping 13 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s to train its spies. It returned five victims and their families and says the rest are dead. But Japan maintains that the other abductees are alive and that more Japanese were snatched than the secretive state has admitted. Abe's government has maintained sweeping sanctions on North Korea imposed after its nuclear test in October, including a ban on all imports from the impoverished state.
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