Abduction and ‘comfort women’ are totally different issues: PM Abe

   Prime Minster Abe Shinzo on March 26 said to reporters in the Diet Building that North Korea’s abduction of Japanese nationals and wartime “comfort women” are “totally different issues,” adding, “The abduction is an issue of an ongoing human rights violation.”

   This remark was a response to a Washington Post editorial that criticized Abe for being “blind to Japan’s own war crimes” in contrast to his position on the abduction issue.

   While stressing, “The situation in which Japanese people are held in North Korea still continues,” the prime minister dismissed the wartime sex slavery issue as a past event by saying, “The comfort women issue lies in the past.”

   He rejected the international criticism that the Japanese government has a double standard regarding human rights, and this statement will inevitably provoke further criticism.                       - Akahata, March 27, 2007