Japan considers aid for N Korea flood victims

TOKYO, Aug 28 (Reuters) Japan's new foreign minister said today the government was considering an offer of aid for flood victims in North Korea despite an unresolved row over Japanese citizens abducted by Pyongyang decades ago.

North Korea's official media has reported at least 600 deaths this month in some of the worst flooding to hit the impoverished state in decades. The United Nations launched an appeal for assistance on Monday and South Korea has already sent aid.

Japan has refused to give full-scale economic assistance to North Korea or establish diplomatic ties unless the emotive issue of Japanese abducted by Pyongyang's agents in the 1970s and 1980s is resolved.

But Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura, who was appointed on Monday in a cabinet reshuffle, said Tokyo could take a different stand on emergency aid.

''I am not sure that Japan should link this kind of natural disaster to the abductee issue,'' he told reporters. ''We are considering the matter urgently. We understand that an answer is needed as soon as possible, given the nature of the problem.'' Machimura also said he expected progress at a second round of talks on re-establishing bilateral ties, to be held in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, starting on September 5.

Those discussions are part of a six-country deal, struck in February, to scrap Pyongyang's nuclear arms programme in exchange for aid and diplomatic recognition.

The Asian neighbours held similar talks in March in Hanoi, but they stalled mainly over the issue of the Japanese citizens who were spirited away from their homeland to help train North Korean spies in Japanese language and culture.

''This time around we have had some preparatory meetings, so I think it will be more significant than the first round. I hope there will be some progress, even if it is only a step or half a step,'' Machimura said, declining to give a definition of progress.

A failure to improve ties could hinder the six-party pact agreed by the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia because Tokyo is reluctant to give large-scale aid to Pyongyang in return for abandoning its nuclear ambitions.

Last month, North Korea shut its Yongbyon reactor complex that produces weapons-grade plutonium in return for 50,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil under their February 13 deal.

Under ''phase two'' of the agreement, North Korea will get a further 950,000 tonnes of oil in return for ''disabling'' its atomic facilities and coming clean on its nuclear secrets. But the last round of nuclear talks ended last month without a target date for that.

North Korea admitted in 2002 that its agents had abducted 13 Japanese, sparking outrage in Japan.

Five of them were repatriated that same year, but Pyongyang says the other eight are dead. Tokyo wants more information about the eight and four others it says were also kidnapped, and wants any survivors sent home.

North Korea insists the case on abductions is closed and demands that Japan make compensation for its often-brutal colonial rule of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945.

REUTERS MS BST2125