Niigata, the biggest city on the west coast, on the Sea of Japan. On the evening of 15 November 1977, in a residential area, Megumi Yokota, age 13, is walking back home after playing badminton with friends. A model child, she always goes straight home from the gym, which is only 500 metres or so away from where she lives. On this brief walk home, she takes leave of two friends at two successive street corners. At the third, Megumi disappears. The police and their search dogs find no trace whatsoever of Megumi or her red bag and racket.

This mysterious disappearance is like tens of others reported in Japan between 1977 and 1983. Thirty years later, Megumi’s parents and the Japanese authorities assume she is still alive, in North Korea. She was taken there by force by agents of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), who shut her into a sack and placed her aboard a small boat for the 40-hour crossing between Japan and the Korean Peninsula.

Japan has officially identified 17 abductions of this kind (eight men and nine women or youngsters) and has begun negotiations with the DPRK to shed light on another 30 or so cases. More than 40 associations of families of victims have been set up; they cite the figure of some 100 abductions.

BELATED ADMISSION

The first suspicions were voiced in 1991, but Pyongyang denied any involvement, denouncing a campaign of calumny. It was not until 17 September 2002, a quarter of a century later, that leader Kim Jong-Il acknowledged his country’s implication in the abductions. At his first official meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, he apologised for these acts committed by “impetuous agents”. According to the North Koreans, five Japanese victims were still alive and eight had died; there was no confirmation that any others had ever entered North Korea. This belated admission of responsibility sparked outrage among the families of victims and the Japanese public opinion. A month later, on 15 October 2002, the five survivors, among them two couples, returned to Japan after 24 years of absence. Their children, born in captivity, did not join them until 2004.

Megumi did not return home. According to Pyongyang, she committed suicide in 1994. The DPRK also claims that the others, who were in their 20s at the time they were abducted, had all died violent deaths: road accidents, heart attacks or accidental suffocation. Asked to produce evidence of these claims, the North Korean officials provided documents that Tokyo considers forgeries. For Megumi, as for other cases, human remains were returned to Japan, but DNA testing determined that the remains were not those of the victims.

LIKELY REASONS

But why kidnap ordinary Japanese citizens: students, a nursing student and her mother, a restaurant employee, a film-maker, an actor and even a 13-year-old school girl?

It is widely believed that during the Cold War years, North Korean spies used the identities of Japanese citizens to try to infiltrate South Korea. The victims were allegedly abducted to teach these agents the Japanese language, culture and way of thinking. This was the explanation given by two North Korean agents arrested in South Korea and Thailand. Other accounts and the debriefing of the five Japanese citizens released in 2002 shed light on the abductions and the hardships inflicted on the victims during their captivity, but without explaining the reasons for the kidnappings.

NATIONAL TRAGEDY

In Japan, the publicity over the abductions created a national tragedy, which has taken on an emotional and political scope unimaginable in Europe. The victims’ families have made their voice heard through petitions, conferences, radio and TV programmes and through numerous support groups. Sympathisers wear a sky-blue ribbon, just as Europeans wear pins in support of the fight against AIDS or other causes. Today, eight North Korean agents involved in the abductions have been identified and international arrest warrants have been issued against them. In September 2006, a headquarters for the abduction issue was created, placed under the direct authority of the Japanese prime minister and involving all members of government.

INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT

North Korea considers the matter resolved. For Japan, the issue is a question of national sovereignty and the security of its nationals. It has had resolutions adopted by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the UN General Assembly and the G8. Japan has raised the issue with the world’s leaders: in 2006, George W. Bush met Sakie Yokota, Megumi’s mother, at the White House. She and her husband, both in their 70s, are well known in Japan and regularly meet journalists to reiterate their conviction that their daughter is still alive. Residing in the outskirts of Tokyo, they showed us the photo of a woman in her early forties who could be their daughter.

The compassion of the American president may not be devoid of ulterior motives. Before Bush took office, Washington had already placed North Korea in the category of ‘rogue states’. The Bush administration then included it, in 2002, in the ‘axis of evil’ countries. Indeed, the DPRK seems to have done everything to earn that label. It has implemented a uranium enrichment programme since 1989. In 2003, it withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In July 2006, it test-fired a ballistic missile in the Sea of Japan and in October of the same year it detonated a nuclear device. Criticised by the international community as a whole, and seen as a threat to peace and stability in northeast Asia, North Korea has even seen its Chinese ally distance itself.

GLOBAL PROBLEM?

Bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States cannot allow itself to open a new military front. It has been participating, since 2003, in the six-party talks with Japan, China, Russia and North and South Korea, trying to convince Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear programme. It is now time for conciliation. In February 2008, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra gave a historic concert in Pyongyang, which was broadcast throughout the world. The DPRK is demanding that the Americans take it off the list of terrorist states, where it was placed following the mid-air explosion of a Korean Air Lines aircraft, which left 115 dead in 1987. In Tokyo, the foreign minister has had to reassure the Japanese: “The United States has made it clear that it will not improve its relations with the DPRK at the expense of the Japanese-American alliance”.

Tokyo, meanwhile, is blowing hot and cold: between financial and trade sanctions (total embargo on import-export after the North Korean nuclear test) and economic and humanitarian assistance for a ‘Soviet-style’ economy incapable of feeding its 23 million inhabitants. The 2002 acknowledgment of certain abductions was wrung out of the North Koreans by the promise of Japanese aid, moreover. In October 2007, in exchange for the shutdown of the Yongbyon reactor, Tokyo promised to supply up to one million tonnes of heavy fuel oil to compensate for the energy shortage. “A mere drop considering what we could supply,” explains a Japanese diplomat, alluding to the US$300 million in assistance and US$500 million in bank loans granted by Japan, a former colonial power, to South Korea following the 1965 Normalisation Treaty.

And so these sordid crimes find themselves at the heart of complex and crucial diplomatic manoeuvres. Japan legitimately stresses the fact that diplomatic normalisation and stability in the region will only be possible if this issue is completely resolved, ie if all the surviving victims are returned to Japan, all the other cases clarified and the perpetrators of the abductions handed over.

Tokyo is counting on its European allies to join the diplomatic efforts, using a subtle mix of economic pressure and assistance to bring about change in one of the world’s most isolated regimes. The European Union – seven of its member states have embassies in Pyongyang – “cannot be content to be a messenger; it too has interests,” says a senior official in Tokyo. He adds: “EU humanitarian aid should be used as an incentive to force the DPRK to negotiate with Japan”.

Every EU-Japan yearly summit adopts a formal joint declaration that voices “serious concern about the human rights situation in the DPRK” and European support for Japan’s “efforts intended to lead to the earliest possible settlement of the abductions issue”. The Europeans fear that this matter may become such a sore spot as to hamper the settlement of a situation whose nuclear stakes at global level are alarming. “The world’s security is indivisible,” say sources in Brussels.

Sordid crimes at the heart of complex and crucial diplomatic manoeuvres 

The Association of the Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea point out that North Korea abducted more than 80,000 South Koreans during the Korean War and up to 489 following the 1953 armistice. They also accuse North Korea of having kidnapped three Japanese nationals in Europe, along with nationals from a total of 12 countries, among them France (3), Italy (1), the Netherlands (2) and Romania (1).