TOKYO — Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday thanked Japan’s prime minister for not giving in to demands by kidnappers in Iraq to withdraw Japanese forces in exchange for the release of Japanese hostages, and vowed the United States will help locate the victims abducted last week.
Mr. Cheney said the United States “wholeheartedly” supports Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s tough choice and will “make certain we do everything we can to be of assistance.”
Other U.S. officials said military forces in Iraq are attempting to locate the three Japanese civilians grabbed in a series of kidnappings in Iraq of 30 foreigners from at least 12 countries, including the abduction of nationals from three countries the vice president is visiting this week: Japan, China and South Korea.
“We are deeply appreciative of the work we do together all over the globe,” Mr. Cheney told reporters after meeting with Mr. Koizumi. “But we especially appreciate Japan’s role in helping with the war on terror, and their work with us in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the fact that they’ve taken on significant responsibilities in those endeavors.”
The nine Chinese nationals kidnapped last week were released yesterday, and the eight South Koreans escaped or were released last week.
A senior Bush administration official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity said the kidnappings in Iraq were part of a plan by Iraqi insurgents to increase their use of intimidation and violence to try to change foreign government policies.
“In a sense that’s sort of the basic fundamental strategy of somebody who resorts to terror,” the senior official said. “And it’s important that they not be allowed to do that. If governments respond to those kinds of actions, it will simply encourage more of the same.”
On North Korea, Mr. Cheney said Americans share the “outrage” of the Japanese over North Korea’s abduction of Japanese nationals, dating back to the 1970s. The United States supports Tokyo’s demand for a “resolution of all the issues surrounding the criminal abduction of your citizens by the regime in Pyongyang,” he said.
North Korea in 2002 admitted to Japan that it had kidnapped Japanese citizens and taken them to North Korea to help train intelligence officers. Pyongyang has not fully accounted for all those who were abducted, and Japan has demanded a full accounting at the six-party nuclear talks.
The senior official said Mr. Cheney and Mr. Koizumi agreed that North Korea must dismantle its nuclear program completely and in a verifiable and irreversible manner.
“I think we’ve made progress, but there’s still a ways to go,” the senior official said.
The senior official said the spread of nuclear arms “is one of the most serious problems in the world today” that threatens the United States and its allies.
“And North Korea is a special problem because of their past history, because we know they have developed plutonium and they claim now to have reprocessed plutonium as well, because, separate and apart from that, and in violation of the 1994 agreement, they have developed the capacity to enrich uranium.”
The senior official said North Korea was a “customer” of the covert nuclear weapons technology supplier network headed by Pakistani Abdul Qadeer Khan, which also supplied nuclear goods to Libya and Iran.
As a result, North Korea is a key agenda item for all of Mr. Cheney’s talks in Asia to “move this whole process forward so we can achieve our objective of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula through diplomatic means.”
Mr. Cheney also met yesterday with Yasuo Fukuda, the chief Cabinet secretary who is a powerful figure within the Japanese government.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.