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Japan, N.Korea set for normalisation talks

TOKYO: Japan said on Wednesday it will hold full-scale talks in Pyongyang on normalising diplomatic ties with North Korea in early April, the first such talks between the historic foes in more than seven years.

The five days of talks from April 4 in the North Korean capital follow Tokyo's announcement earlier this month that it would resume food aid to the famine-hit Stalinist state.

Japanese Foreign Minister Yohei Kono said the two sides would discuss "various issues of mutual concern" including the alleged abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korea and Pyongyang's suspected nuclear programme.

"We will do our best and deal with issues patiently," Kono told a news conference.

The announcement comes as North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun begins a three-week tour this week of China, Southeast Asia and Latin America in what analysts say could be a diplomatic overture to scale down the North's isolationist policy.

A key sticking point in talks has been the issue of at least 10 Japanese who Tokyo believes were kidnapped by North Korean agents. They disappeared over a 20-year period up to the early 1980s, many from remote coastal areas on the Sea of Japan, which separates the two countries.

Japan began normalisation talks with North Korea in early 1991, but they collapsed the following year when Pyongyang stormed out after Tokyo accused its agents of kidnapping a Japanese woman.

The relations between Tokyo and Pyongyang hit rock bottom when reclusive North Korea launched a three-stage missile over Japan's main island of Honshu in August 1998. Pyongyang said it was not a missile but a satellite.

But the two neighbours have shown a willingness to improve bilateral ties in the past several months.

In Beijing last week, Red Cross officials from Japan and North Korea agreed to cooperate on bilateral humanitarian matters that have blocked efforts to establish diplomatic relations.

North Korea also agreed to launch a nationwide investigation into the fate of the Japanese nationals Tokyo says the communist state kidnapped.

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

But a Japanese government source said no major breakthrough was expected in initial rounds of normalisation talks.

Analysts say Japan is keen to keep in step with the United States and South Korea in gradually improving relations with North Korea.

Foreign Minister Kono said he would make a two-day visit to South Korea from Sunday for talks with South Korean leaders including President Kim Dae-jung.

"The main purpose of my trip is to closely coordinate Japan's policy on North Korea with South Korea," he said.

Japan, which annexed the Korean peninsula in 1910 and kept it as a colony until the end of World War Two in 1945, established diplomatic ties with capitalist South Korea in 1965, but it has yet to do so with the North.-Reuters