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Japan, N Korea Red Cross officials in accord

BEIJING: Red Cross officials from Japan and North Korea agreed on Monday to cooperate on a set of bilateral humanitarian issues that have blocked efforts to establish diplomatic relations, Japanese officials said.

In more than four hours of talks, North Korea thanked Tokyo for its offer of 100,000 tonnes of rice for Pyongyang, Japan Red Cross Society vice-president Tadateru Konoe told reporters in Beijing. He described the talks as friendly and businesslike.

The rice, to be given through the U.N. World Food Programme, marks a resumption of Japanese food aid to famine-hit North Korea for the first time in more than two years.

Japan suspended all food aid to Pyongyang after North Korea fired a rocket over Japan's main Honshu island and into the Pacific Ocean in August 1998.

North Korea also agreed to conduct a nationwide investigation into the fate of Japanese citizens Tokyo says were kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1960s and 1970s, Konoe said.

The two sides further agreed that 16 Japanese women who married North Koreans and moved to the Stalinist state decades ago would visit their hometowns in Japan in April and May in the third batch of family reunion visits since 1997, Konoe said.

EMOTIVE ISSUE OF MISSING JAPANESE

The issue of the missing Japanese citizens, which scuttled normalisation talks at the start of the 1990s, remains one of the stickiest points in the efforts to forge diplomatic ties between the two.

At least 10 Japanese were allegedly kidnapped to teach Japanese to potential North Korean spies. Reports of the kidnappings have come from testimony by North Korean defectors to the South. Pyongyang has angrily denied any such abductions.

Konoe said the North Korean delegation, headed by Ho Hae-ryong, said Red Cross branches at all levels in North Korea, as well as local government and state security bodies, had agreed to cooperate in the search for missing Japanese.

"Our understanding is that any of those missing persons who are discovered and wish to return to Japan will be allowed to do so," he said.

The Beijing talks took place a week after families of alleged Japanese abductees held a sit-in protest against Tokyo's plan to resume food aid to its Stalinist neighbour.

About 50 people gathered in front of Japan's Foreign Ministry demanding the government not give food to a country that had shown no willingness to discuss the abduction issue.

Although no date was set for a new round of talks, Konoe said that working-level discussions would be necessary to arrange the home visits for the Japanese women.

Japanese media quoted Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi as saying in Tokyo on Monday the Red Cross talks were "extremely important" as a first step toward normalisation of ties with North Korea.

"I'm not optimistic about it, but I have hopes for it," Kyodo news agency quoted Obuchi as telling reporters.

Tokyo hopes engagement with the Pyongyang regime can help defuse the threat of future missile launches.

At the same time, analysts say Japan is keen to keep in step with the United States and South Korea in gradually improving relations with North Korea.

Japan, which annexed and colonised the Korean peninsula from 1910-45, established diplomatic ties with capitalist South Korea in 1965, but it has yet to do so with the communist North.-Reuters