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Koizumi to visit N. Korea for crisis talks

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE, MAY 21. The Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, will hold talks with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, in Pyongyang on Saturday in a bid to defuse the continuing crisis as regards the overall Korean question in all its ramifications.

Speaking to reporters ahead of the summit, Mr. Koizumi said in Tokyo today that he would strive for a `success', especially over the lingering issues concerning the Cold-War-era abductions of several Japanese nationals by North Korea. This issue had figured prominently in the first-ever Koizumi-Kim summit in Pyongyang in September 2002. Five of those, who were kidnapped at the height of the Cold War, were later allowed to travel to Japan, with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or the North) maintaining that the other `abductees' had died by the time of the first Koizumi-Kim summit.

The primary question now is whether the DPRK will allow the relatives of the five in focus to travel to Japan for family reunion in each case, even as Pyongyang is sore with Tokyo for not sending the five back to North Korea itself.

Although the abductions-issue is essentially a bilateral matter between Japan and the DPRK, only a resolution of this problem would enable Tokyo to give a positive thrust to the ongoing multilateral parleys on Pyongyang's nuclear-weapons programme, according to regional diplomats. Of particular importance in this context is Japan's possible role in offering suitable economic incentives to the DPRK in exchange for its own moves towards a "complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement'' of its nuclear-weapons programme.

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