North Korea threatened Japan on Dec 16, 2004

North Korea threatens Japan with war

NEW STANDOFF: Pyongyang said yesterday any sanctions imposed on it by Japan would mean a declaration of war and would prompt an `effective physical' reaction
AFP , SEOUL
North Korea warned yesterday that it would regard any sanctions imposed on it by Japan as a declaration of war and would hit back with an "effective physical" response.

It also said it would reconsider its participation in six-nation talks aimed at ending the nuclear stand-off if a "provocative campaign" under way in Japan against the country continued, a foreign ministry spokesman said.

The outburst came after Japan said it would halt aid shipments to the impoverished Stalinist state in a dispute over the fate of Japanese nationals abducted by North Korean agents during the Cold War.

It also came amid efforts to jump-start stalled talks on the nuclear stand-off three months after Pyongyang failed to show for a scheduled fourth round.

"If sanctions are applied against the DPRK [North Korea] ..., we will regard it as a declaration of war against our country and promptly react to the action by an effective physical method," the unidentified spokesman said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

Japan swiftly shrugged off the North Korean warning, with Prime Min-ister Junichiro Koizumi suggesting the threat of an "effective physical" response might be part of a political strategy by Pyongyang.

"We have to look carefully at what their true intentions are," Koizumi said in Tokyo.

More than two-thirds of Japanese support sanctions against the Stalinist state, according to a newspaper poll, to punish Pyongyang for falsely claiming that human remains it passed to Japan belonged to two Japanese abductees.

One of those kidnapped to train spies in Japanese language and culture was Megumi Yokota, abducted in 1977 as a 13-year-old schoolgirl.

Tokyo announced last week that DNA tests showed ashes handed to a Japanese delegation last month did not, as Pyongyang claimed, belong to Yokota.

The finding reignited anger in Japan against North Korea and Tokyo froze shipments of food aid to the destitute country.

A Japanese official said on Tuesday that the US had warned Japan to be cautious about imposing sanctions on North Korea because the unpredictable regime could "out-manoeuvre" such a move.

Seoul feared that sanctions could derail efforts to end the nuclear standoff.

"The stance of our government is that peaceful dialogue rather than sanctions or a blockade will do more to draw North Korea into the dialogue table," Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon said.

The North Korean foreign-ministry statement accused Japan of doctoring the DNA test for political reasons and insisted that the human remains were those of Yokota.

They had been handed to Japanese authorities by Yokota's husband and it was "unimaginable" he would give them the ashes of anyone else, the spokesman said.

Instead, elements in Japan were trying to revive a long-standing row over the abductions "because they needed a subterfuge to justify Japan's militarization, hold in check any improvement in the bilateral relations and step up their political and military interference in regional issues," he said.

He accused the US of supporting this because it wanted to provoke a war on the Korean Peninsula.

North Korea has returned five kidnap victims to Japan after admitting in 2002 to the abductions in return for an aid package and talks on normalizing relations.

But the families of eight other abductees whom Pyongyang claims are dead believe they are still alive and being detained in North Korea because they know too much about the secretive regime.

The talks aimed at persuading North Korea to halt its nuclear weapons drive have stalled after three rounds since Pyongyang boycotted a fourth session planned for September.

Beijing calls 5,286 mine deaths an `improvement'

AP , BEIJING
Fires, floods and other disasters killed 5,286 Chinese miners in the first 11 months of this year, but safety in the industry is improving, the government said.

The figures were announced as the death toll in the latest disaster, a coal mine fire in central China, rose to 18.

The industry's death toll so far this year is 8 percent below the figure for the same period last year, due to a nationwide campaign, the State Administration for Work Safe-ty said on Tuesday.

But it said the fatality rate per tonne of coal mined is still 100 times that of the US. China says it accounted for 80 percent of all coal mining deaths worldwide last year.

Most of China's miners work in coal mines, but fatalities were also reported this year in gold, tin and other mines.

In the latest deaths, the bodies of 13 miners in the Xinli Coal Mine in Hunan province were found on Tuesday some 500m below the surface, Xinhua News Agency said. It said five were found earlier.

The agency quoted a survivor as saying the fire that broke out on Monday in the mine was caused by a faulty air compressor.

Accidents are often blamed on lack of ventilation and fire-control equipment, poor maintenance or indifference to safety rules.

The Chinese government says it has budgeted some 4 billion yuan (US$500 million) since 2000 to improve ventilation in mines and reduce other safety hazards.

US slams China's one-child program

'SUBJECT TO TORTURE': State Department officials launched a new attack on China's family-planning policy, citing the example of a woman in a labor camp
AP , WASHINGTON 

Despite some changes, China's one-child family planning program remains a source of coercion, forced abortions, infanticide and perilously imbalanced boy-girl ratios, US State Department officials said.

Testimony before the US House International Relations Committee on Tuesday focused on a Shanghai woman who, since her second pregnancy in the late 1980s, has been assigned to psychiatric wards, coerced into an abortion, and removed from her job. She is reportedly subject to torture in a labor camp.

Mao Hengfeng, said US Con-gressman Christopher Smith, "is the most egregious example of China's mistreatment of women who do not comply with China's draconian policies, but there are thousands of other victims."

China in the 1970s launched a one-child policy to slow the growth of its population, now at 1.3 billion. Couples who have unsanctioned children have been subject to heavy fines, job losses and forced sterilization.

There have been some modifications, allowing second children for ethnic populations and rural families whose first child is a girl. In 2002, under strong US pressure, Beijing enacted a law aimed at standardizing birth-control policies and reducing corruption and coercion.

Arthur Dewey, the US State Department assistant secretary for population, refugees and migration, said there were some encouraging signs that China "may be beginning to understand that its coercive birth-planning regime has had extremely negative social, economic and human rights consequences for the nation."

Dewey added, however, that "China's birth-planning law and policies retain harshly coercive elements in law and practice."

Among those effects have been female infanticide in rural areas where there is a strong desire for male heirs, imbalances in the sex ratio that has been estimated to be as much as 122 boys for every 100 girls, soaring rates of female suicide, and human trafficking.

"The one-child policy is the most pervasive source of human-rights violations in China today," said Harry Wu, a human-rights activist who spent 19 years in the Chinese labor camp system.

Wu cited a 2003 document from an area of southern Guangdong Province where party secretaries and village heads were told their salaries would be cut in half if, in a 35-day period, they did not reach a goal of sterilizing 1,369 people, fitting 818 with IUDs and carrying out 163 abortions.

The case of Mao, said Michael Kozak, the State Department's acting assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor, highlights four serious abuses in the Chinese system: Coercive family planning, continued use of "re-education through labor" camps, forced incarceration in psychiatric hospitals and torture.

"Mao's case is an example of what can and does go wrong in China," Kozak said.

Mao, who had twins in 1987, was confined to a psychiatric ward for six days in 1989 after another pregnancy sparked a fight with her work unit. She was fired from her job after protesting her treatment despite agreeing to abort another pregnancy, was sent back to a psychiatric hospital where she said she was tortured, and last April was given an 18-month sentence in a labor camp.

Smith, a leading critic of China's human rights and abortion record, said he was "very fearful that the torture may lead to her death."

Fixing China's banks is key

No one is blaming China for either the current dollar ratios or the deficit ("Don't scapegoat China for weak dollar and deficit," Dec. 13, page 9). The only concern vis a vis China is its fixed ratio with respect to the US dollar no matter the change in the US dollar exchange rates with other currencies. This is precisely the concern and one which requires a focused reform in banking procedures and non-secured loans within the banking system of China.

The network consequences for bad loan performances are not accounted for in the gradual opening of China's banking system to outside ownership, which is now restricted to a 20 percent limit. Loan pruning proceeds at a pace not sufficient to effect a straitening of that banking system in time sufficient to render China an equitable trading partner for the US.

While retail importers may call the clothing and textile industry in the US a declining industry, it is still an industry that employs a total of 686,000 workers in all its branches. Elimination of quotas without a labor law code which protects independent union organizing and collective bargaining, a lack of law enforcement for these kinds of laws, the maintenance of the fixed forex ratio between the yuan and the US dollar -- combined with extremely low labor-wage rates in China such that not even Honduras and Nicaragua can compete -- these are the combinations of factors which cause concern.

Add a quarter-million workers here and a quarter-million workers there in high-tech and, before you know it, you are talking about real numbers of real people -- 2.6 million in fact -- and many of these are naturalized Americans who have immigrated from China. That is a large number of people trying to develop good replacement positions for their own careers and vested equities in just two or three years. No one blames China for the budget deficit nor the dollar ratio. In fact, we are encouraged that the market is placing the dollar in its current ratios with respect to the yen, the euro and other currencies. In fact, this allows our manufacturers to compete for orders in markets outside the continental US for the first time in many years. This is a good thing for domestic industries.

We do need to manage the budget deficit. We also need to determine a way to speed the improvement of loan ratios in the banking system of China and to deregulate the yuan at a faster pace than is currently anticipated without causing turmoil or providing opportunity for disruption in China's financial system.

Eric Hands