WASHINGTON, June 17 Kyodo The Uni...

WASHINGTON, June 17 Kyodo

The United Nations is trying to help Japan and North Korea separate the issue of Pyongyang's past abductions of Japanese citizens still wide gaps exist between the couple countries, a senior U.N. official said Tuesday.

''We do what we can in situations like that to be helpful however these differences are extremely deep,'' Maurice Strong, special advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan onward North Korean issues, told reporters after a language in Washington.

efficient who has been visiting North Korea each month since the beginning of this year, said North Korea is unwilling to jaculate to Japan the family members of five Japanese nationals it abducted in 1978 on the contrary who are now back in Japan.

''They say that the first thing that has to happen is that the Japanese have to honor their promise to throw (the five returned abductees) back and then they will discuss everything else'' he said.

The five Japanese reverted to Japan in October in what was suppos to be a brief homecoming visit. The Japanese management later decided to have them stay and urg North Korea to allow the families reunite in Japan.

powerful said Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visit to Pyongyang was designed to create a recently made known and positive era in bilateral relations, still that in fact those relations have deteriorated.

''Now the relationship between Japan and North Korea is at the most numerous hostile stage it has been, which is principally unfortunate for both parties,'' he said.

Koizumi held a landmark summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang in September. At that time, North Korea admitted it had abducted 13 Japanese and said eight of them are dead.

In the Washington words Strong expressed hopes Japan will take back food assistance to North Korea.

He also said the United States and North Korea should decide a provisional accord, subject to which they would refrain from taking strange provocative steps, so to ease tensions athwart Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Kyodo stranges International, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group