Japan Asks U.S. Not to Pursue Desertion Case

The Japanese government has asked the United States to allow Charles Robert Jenkins, a GI who allegedly deserted and crossed into North Korea in 1965, to move to Japan without fear of prosecution, Japanese sources said.

The request was made last week to Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, who was here primarily to discuss concerns about North Korea’s nuclear program, and had been broached at lower levels.

The idea is to allow Jenkins, who is now 63, to live in Japan with his Japanese wife, Hitomi Soga. She was abducted by North Korea decades ago, married Jenkins there, and was released more than a year ago.

Katsuei Hirasawa, a Japanese legislator who met with North Korean officials in December in Beijing, said they indicated they wanted to send Jenkins and the couple’s two daughters, ages 20 and 18, to Japan along with family members of other Japanese held in North Korea. But releasing Jenkins would put him in danger of arrest on a charge of desertion. The United States and Japan have an extradition treaty.

“If he is going to be prosecuted, Soga doesn’t want him to come. And in that case, she might ask to go back to North Korea.... She loves her husband,” Hirasawa said in an interview last week. “For that reason, we have through various official channels asked the U.S. government to give a pardon to Jenkins.”

Hirasawa said Japan appreciated the difficulty of pardoning someone accused of desertion -- especially one who crossed enemy lines to a country that has been subsequently labeled by President Bush as part of an “axis of evil” -- and will probably not press the case hard until the situation in Iraq is closer to resolution.

“We realize that this is an exceptional case,” Hirasawa said.

Over the weekend, Shinzo Abe, secretary-general of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic party, met with Soga and others who had been abducted and taken to North Korea, then returned.

According to a report in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, Abe told Soga he had explained to Armitage that “it’s important to create a condition so that [Jenkins] can come back to Japan. I hope that the United States will be considerate and have a generous thought on the arrangement.”

Another Japanese source, who has been involved with informal negotiations with the North Koreans over the abduction issue, said he believed that the United States and Japan had come to an understanding over Jenkins.

“I’m sure there is a deal that will allow him to come to Japan without being punished,” the source said on condition of anonymity.

An official at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo said that no agreement had been made and that the military would be unlikely to waive its right to prosecute Jenkins without talking to him about his life in North Korea.

“The military side has said that we cannot predispose any outcome without knowing what he did in North Korea,” the official said, also on condition of anonymity. Jenkins, a native of North Carolina, was a 24-year-old army sergeant stationed in South Korea when he walked across the demilitarized zone. Aside from occasional appearances in North Korean propaganda, little was seen or heard of him until October 2002, when the North Koreans admitted that they had, as alleged for years, abducted Japanese citizens. They said that one of the Japanese abductees was married to Jenkins.

The plight of Japanese citizens who were kidnapped by North Koreans is an issue with huge emotional impact in Japan, like the Iran hostage crisis was in the United States. The repatriation of the remaining Japanese abductees and their family members is considered essential for North Korea to improve relations with Japan.

At the same time as the international community negotiates with the North over nuclear weapons, less-publicized talks have been taking place between North Korea and Japan over the children of five abductees, Soga included, who were sent home to Japan in 2002.

North Korea offered to release the children, but only if the abductees would come to Pyongyang to pick them up. That offer was rejected. Sources involved in the talks say it would be hard to complete a deal without a decision about Jenkins.

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Staff writer Mark Magnier in Beijing contributed to this report.