Saturday, Aug. 12, 2006

China weapons cleanup requires five more years

The Associated Press

Efforts to recover and dispose of hundreds of thousands of chemical weapons abandoned in China by the Imperial army at the end of World War II will take five years longer than planned, a Japanese official said Friday.

An international convention passed in 1997 requires Japan to remove the weapons by next April, but Japan and China requested a five-year extension to 2012 because of the large number of weapons yet to be unearthed.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Hague-based organization that oversees the treaty, approved the extension last month, said Keigo Akashi, a Cabinet Office official in charge of the weapons disposal project.

Akashi said Japan wants to make preparations to build a chemical weapons disposal plant in Jilin Province in northeastern China by the end of next March, pending approval by the Chinese government.

Japan has so far removed 38,000 chemical weapons.

The Imperial army controlled China's northeast for a decade before its defeat in 1945 and left behind about 700,000 chemical weapons -- a lingering source of resentment for many Chinese. Nearly half of the shells are believed to be in the Jilin area, according to a Japanese government estimate.

Beijing says abandoned chemical weapons have killed at least 2,000 people since 1945.

The measures to dispose of the abandoned munitions are a rare point of agreement between Tokyo and Beijing, whose ties have been strained in recent years.

Japan's relations with China are at their worst in decades, with disputes between the two sides over Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine, territorial issues and history textbooks making cooperation in other areas difficult.

Koreans seek remains

Relatives of South Koreans who were taken to Japan as forced laborers or conscripted into the Japanese military during the war and died in Japan submitted a letter Friday to the Japanese government asking it to step up efforts to find as many of their remains as possible and investigate how each one died.

The letter submitted by the South Koreans, including Lee Gum Su, 62, and Kim Gum Sun, 60, also asked the government to apologize upon returning the remains and deal with the issue as a humanitarian matter.

Their requests also included allowing relatives in North Korea of forced laborers and conscripts to enter Japan. The North Korean kin were denied entry in late July as part of sanctions Japan imposed following Pyongyang's July 5 ballistic missile tests. The relatives were seeking the return of the remains of their kin.