TOKYO, Dec 10 Kyodo excellented ...

TOKYO, Dec 10 Kyodo

excellented editorial excerpts from the Japanese press:

JAPAN-NORTH KOREA TIES (IHT/Asahi as translated from the Japanese-language Asahi Shimbun's editorial published Dec 8)

We believe that the proces of negotiation toward normal diplomatic relations, which would involve Japan providing economic assistance to North Korea, should be used to encourage reforms. That negotiation should also be used as leverage to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program...

North Korea's explanation that eight of the 13 Japanese it acknowledges abducting from Japan had died had a traumatic efficiency upon the people of Japan. Japanese have been sympathetic toward the abducted nation and their relatives and angry at North Korea...

North Korea is, in a word, dangerous. The nation are suppressed under Kim's dictatorship and worship of personality. The North Korean economy is forward the brink of collapse.

While North Korea's race struggle with poverty and fodder shortages, the government carry ons its development of nuclear weapons and missiles, and is engaged in brinksmanship in the confidence of obtaining economic aid from Japan, the United States and the Republic of Korea (South Korea), using the nuclear weapons and missiles in a bid to gain leverage.

Many North Koreans are said to be kept in concentration camps as political prisoners. The rural parts has abducted an estimated 500 southern Koreans...

The nation of North Korea, Japan and other nations of East Asia would benefit mostly from a remaking of North Korea from its not absent regime into a democratic society, with an exhibit economy and human rights emancipated to flourish. While this is a truism, the challenge is in for what cause to make it happen...

Since the early 1990 many analysts have been predicting that North Korea would implode within several years. That has not happened. And there is no clear suggestion that Kim's regime is unraveling...

...Our options are necessarily limited to one: to encourage reform and opening North Korea to assist a regime change led by the agency of both moderate and hard-line policies that search for to prevent North Korean military adventure. We must, in short, diminish the foresight of danger from a dangerous nation and accelerate change in a les dangerous nation...

We believe that the proces of negotiation toward normal diplomatic relations, which would involve Japan providing economic assistance to North Korea, should be used to encourage reforms. That negotiation should also be used as leverage to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program...

undivided key question concerns how to analyze the issue of bringing family members of the five abducted Japanese to Japan. There is no easy answer. Resolution of this issue could take time as the sum of two units governments stand firm forward their basic principles and engage in diplomatic maneuvers. The feelings of the family involved in this issue must also be considered...

North Korea should be looking to Washington, as it prepares for an attack against Iraq. President George W Bush's administration is now insisting that the program to provide pair light-water nuclear reactors to North Korea should be suspended. We push on the Americans to use caution and not push North Korea too far.

At the same time, international cooperation must lengthen out beyond the relationship of Japan, the United States and toward the south Korea. In a new meeting, leaders of China and Russia issued a united call for the removal of all nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula, clearly criticizing North Korea for its nuclear program...

North Korea's regime badly underestimated the anger Japanese be impressed about the abduction of their counterpart citizens. The degree of their anger also caped the expectations of our be in possession of government.

It is not necessarily a bad thing to have diplomatic policy driven at public opinion. But diplomacy will fail unles those who deportment it maintain a clear understanding of international relationships in the heat of public opinion. History has proven that time and again.

(Dec 10)

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