(CNSNews.com) – Amid signs of a chill between the U.S. and Japan over how to handle North Korea, Australia has been asked to step in with energy aid for Pyongyang that Japan is refusing to provide.
 
“There has been some discussion with the United States, Japan and Australia about DPRK [North Korea] assistance,” a spokeswoman for Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith confirmed from Canberra Thursday. “This is currently under consideration by the Australian government.”
 
Although not involved in the six-party process aimed at resolving the North Korean nuclear question, the current government in Canberra, like its predecessor, has offered to help out when necessary. The six parties that have been meeting since 2003 include the U.S., Japan, South Korea, China, Russia and North Korea.
 
There has been talk about expanding the six-party process into a broader regional security framework to handle future issues beyond North Korea, and Australia is keen to participate should such a structure emerge.
 
North Korea has been promised one million tons of heavy fuel oil as part of a deal designed to shut down its nuclear weapons programs. The parties hope Japan will contribute 200,000 tons of the fuel, but it refuses to do so while a long-simmering bilateral dispute with North Korea remains unresolved.
 
That dispute relates to the abduction by North Korea of at least 17 Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 80s, evidently to be used to train the Stalinist regime’s spies in Japanese language and culture.
 
Kim Jong-il in 2002 admitted 13 of the abductions and eventually allowed five of the victims to return to Japan but said the others had died. Japan wants a full accounting, but North Korea says the matter is closed. The issue is a highly emotive one for many Japanese.
 
Washington’s recent decision to remove North Korea from its list of terror-sponsoring countries may have moved forward the process of denuclearizing North Korea, but it shook Japan, which had urged its ally to hold off while the abduction issue remained open.
 
North Korea’s removal from the blacklist came after it stalled on earlier commitments, expelled U.N. inspectors and began reversing steps it had taken to disable its nuclear facilities.
 
The delisting, which was tied to a verification agreement, broke the deadlock, and brought the fuel oil issue onto the front burner.
 
U.S. officials have repeated assurances that Japan’s concerns are taken seriously, while suggesting that the bigger issue should take priority.
 
“We are very aware the job [of clearing up the abductions] is not finished, but we also think it is very important the Japanese people understand that denuclearization is in Japan’s interest,” the State Department’s six-party talks envoy Christopher Hill told Japan’s Asahi Shimbun on Monday.
 
(In South Korea, conservative ruling party lawmakers during a parliamentary discussion Wednesday also criticized the delisting move, noting that the North had yet to apologize for blowing up a South Korean airliner in 1987. The bombing, which killed all 115 people aboard, was the trigger for Pyongyang being added to the blacklist two months later.)
 
Japan has long been the most hard-line of North Korea’s five interlocutors, and North Korea this week seized on signs of differences between Tokyo and Washington to step up demands that Japan be ejected from the talks.
 
Accusing Japan of “working hard to torpedo the six-party talks,” Pyongyang’s official Minju Joson mouthpiece said in a commentary carried by the KCNA news agency that it was “hyping” the abduction issue.
 
“It is quite natural to deprive the Japanese reactionaries of the qualification to participate in the said talks as they are unilaterally sticking to the stand not to honor Japan’s commitment,” it said.
 
So far, North Korea has received a total of about 420,000 tons of fuel oil, 134,000 tons of which came from the U.S., Hill told lawmakers at the end of July.
 
The parties earlier set the end of October as a target date both for delivery of the remaining energy aid and completion of nuclear disabling work, but North Korea’s stalling in recent months makes it unlikely the looming deadline will be made.
 
‘Significant damage’
 
Japan experts say removing North Korea from the terrorism list – a longstanding demand of Pyongyang – leaves the fuel aid as the only source of leverage Tokyo feels it has in the abduction issue.

Japan’s new Prime Minister Taro Aso is already under pressure from the left-wing opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which undermined and helped to bring down his two immediate predecessors and is pushing for early elections.
 
The DPJ has been deriding the government over the terror blacklist issue.
 
Ralph Cossa, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Pacific Forum, said Thursday that although delisting was inevitable, “what hurt was the way it took place, with minimum official forewarning and a reported shouting match over the phone between [Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone].”
 
Prof. Aurelia George Mulgan, a Japan specialist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said a phone call from President Bush to Aso just half an hour before the delisting announcement caught Aso, who was attending a public gathering, “on the hop.”
 
Aso’s government had still been hoping it could dissuade the U.S. and had believed the decision was not imminent, she said.
 
George Mulgan said Japanese feel their entreaties have been ignored, their diplomacy has been impotent and “that Japan has once more been sacrificed to American political interests.”
 
“The left is now attacking the Aso administration for its slavish subordination to the U.S.,” she said, and predicted that “the DPJ’s policies of attaching greater importance to the U.N. rather than the U.S. will now inevitably now attract greater support amongst the Japanese public.”
 
“The whole six-party process has had a negative impact on U.S.-Japan relations,” said Cossa, a close observer of the six-party process. “The question is whether or not it is manageable and how long-lasting it will be.”
 
Cossa said there was “great suspicion and distrust in Japan” towards the State Department over the North Korea issue, “and some significant damage that next president must repair.”
 
The conservative Yomiuri Shimbun said in a commentary Thursday that the delisting has had a serious “psychological effect” on Japan.
 
“Japan has been buffeted more than once by the aftermath of wheeling and dealing between the United States and North Korea,” it said.
 
It cited the Clinton administration signing of an earlier nuclear agreement in 1994 and subsequent “conciliatory stance” towards Pyongyang, most evident when then Secretary of State Madeline Albright visited North Korea in late 2000 – despite the outstanding issue of North Korea’s missiles, “a matter of high concern to Japan.”
 
Under the Bush administration’s first term, the paper said, the U.S. again took a tough approach towards North Korea, but that later “faded away,” despite the abduction issue and a deteriorating security environment for Japan resulting from North Korea’s missile deployments.