Lee upbeat about suffrage for Japan`s ethnic Koreans

(ATTN: UPDATES throughout with comments on N. Korea, background; TRIMS)
By Lee Chi-dong
SEOUL, Jan. 14 (Yonhap) -- President Lee Myung-bak said Thursday he was
optimistic that Japan's parliament will soon pass a bill granting voting rights
to ethnic Koreans there.
About 600,000 ethnic Koreans reside in Japan on a permanent basis, most of them
the descendants of those forcibly brought to Japan during its colonization of the
Korean Peninsula from 1910-45.
Struggling with discrimination in a mostly homogeneous society, Koreans in Japan
have long sought the right to vote in local elections there.
The suffrage issue is highly political and emotional in Japan as conservatives
are opposed to granting voting rights to foreign residents.
"Our request is that Japan should settle the issue of granting suffrage to ethnic
Koreans in Japan within this year," Lee said in a meeting with a group of senior
opinion leaders in South Korea, including several former prime ministers and
parliamentary speakers. Only the president's opening remarks were opened to
media.
"I believe it will be resolved smoothly," Lee said, adding Japanese Prime
Minister Yukio Hatoyama and Ichiro Ozawa, secretary-general of the ruling
Democratic Party of Japan, promised to deal with the issue.
The Japanese government said earlier this week that it will submit the bill to
the Diet on suffrage for foreign residents. Japan's parliament is to open a
session next Monday. The move comes as Seoul and Tokyo seek to better their ties
this year, the centenary of Japan's colonization of the peninsula.
With regard to North Korea, Lee said Seoul's policy toward Pyongyang is on a
normal track.
The conservative president has been adamant about linking South Korea's aid and
economic cooperation with the North to progress in its denuclearization.
He stressed that the two Koreas have a good chance to improve relations on the
occasion of the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War, saying his
government will try to enhance North Korean people's living standards. The war
ended in 1953 in a cease-fire, not a peace treaty, leaving the two sides
technically at war.
Lee reaffirmed that his "Grand Bargain" proposal, aimed at striking a package
deal with Pyongyang to end its nuclear program and break its diplomatic
isolation, was made in prior consultations with the U.S., China, Russia, and
Japan, all of which are members of the six-way talks.
North Korea and the U.S. discussed the issue during a trip by Stephen Bosworth,
U.S. special representative for North Korea policy, to Pyongyang last month,
added Lee.
"They will have good diplomatic channels," the president said without elaborating.
Meanwhile, the president, struggling to broaden public support for his revised
Sejong City plan, listened to various opinions on the matter in the closed-door
meeting Thursday, his spokesman Park Sun-kyoo said later.
The government announced a plan Monday that it will push for a project to build a
business town in the envisioned town in the center of the country, an alternative
to a plan by the former Roh Moo-hyun administration to relocate about a dozen
ministries and other government offices there.
lcd@yna.co.kr
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