Miyazawa Pushes Peace Missions for Japan

Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa declared Monday that failure to enact bills authorizing the dispatch of Japan’s armed forces overseas for peacekeeping missions would make Japan look like a “strange” nation to the rest of the world.

He also said the deceleration of Japan’s economy is at an end and predicted that statistics for the January-March period, when announced in June, will show that an upward climb has begun.

Speaking at a nationally televised news conference, Miyazawa expressed his strongest support to date of bills that would enable Japanese troops to participate in a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Cambodia--an issue on which ruling party leaders had faulted him for aloofness.

As an Asian nation, Japan will be asked, “What has Japan become?” if it winds up doing nothing to help Cambodia, he said.

“We are a country that has focused our foreign policy on the United Nations. Now the United Nations is carrying out the biggest peacekeeping mission in its history. The U.N. secretary general’s personal representative in Cambodia is a Japanese, and so is the U.N. commissioner for refugees. In the midst of these circumstances, no matter how you look at it, it would be strange for us to do nothing at all,” he said.

Miyazawa noted that both Prime Minister Hun Sen and Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia have asked Japan to send troops.

“Japan must do something. Most of the people agree that we can’t do nothing,” he said.

Miyazawa said he will devote his full efforts to winning approval “by all means” of bills authorizing the overseas dispatch of troops for participation in peacekeeping missions as well as disaster relief before the present session of Parliament ends June 21. Previously, ruling party leaders blamed Miyazawa’s hands-off posture for failure to win upper house approval of the bills, which passed the lower house last December.

With prices falling on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the gross national product suffering a decline last fall, the 72-year-old prime minister expressed surprising confidence in Japan’s economy. He said the worst has passed.

“I am not taking the economic slowdown lightly, but Japan has experienced downturns like this one many times in my experience over the last 30 to 40 years. Each time, we have overcome the trouble, and we have the power to overcome it this time too,” he said.