Two Japanese hostages freed in Iraq returned home yesterday and Tokyo insisted it would not follow Spain's example and withdraw its troops from Iraq.
"The fact that Spain made that decision and started preparing to withdraw its troops will not change our country's policy," Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba said.
Tokyo's handling of two separate incidents of Japanese civilians being taken hostage in Iraq earned public approval.
But Japan, a close ally of the US, remains divided over the deployment of its troops in Iraq on a non-combat mission to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Japan has around 550 ground troops in Samawa, southern Iraq, in its riskiest military venture since World War II.
Japan's top government spokesman, Yasuo Fukuda, stressed yesterday that the deployment of the troops to Iraq was not connected with the US-led war.
"Humanitarian and reconstruction activities conducted by the Self-Defense Forces [military] do not assist the US combat action," Fukuda told parliament.
Japan had been on tenterhooks earlier this month when an armed group took three Japanese civilians hostage and threatened to kill them if Tokyo did not withdraw its troops from Iraq.
The three were released on Wednesday last week after being held captive near Baghdad for a week.
In a separate incident, two Japanese civilians were seized by a militant group in Iraq last week. The two men -- Jumpei Yasuda, 30, a freelance journalist, and Nobutaka Watanabe, 36, a former member of the Japanese military -- were freed on Saturday and arrived home yesterday.
The two men were critical of Japan's decision to support the US in Iraq and send its troops to the war-ravaged country.
"It is our job to monitor the facts about the battlefield in Iraq and the war Japan has supported," Watanabe said shortly after returning home.
He said he had no plans to go to Iraq again in the foreseeable future as the situation there was dangerous.
In line with Japan's pacifist constitution, the law enabling the reconstruction mission in Samawa limits the troops' activities to "non-combat zones," a concept that critics have charged from the start was meaningless in Iraq.
A survey by major daily Yomiuri Shimbun at the weekend and published yesterday said about three in four Japanese viewed the government's handling of both hostage incidents positively.
It also showed 60 percent of the respondents view the dispatch of Japanese troops to Iraq positively, a rise from 53 percent in January.
The releases of the hostages were a boon for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, a staunch backer of the US. The incidents represented his biggest political challenge since he took office.
The Yomiuri poll showed public support for Koizumi's Cabinet up 6.9 points from a month earlier at 59.2 percent.
Spain's new prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, said on Sunday that Madrid would pull out its 1,400 troops from Iraq as soon as possible.
In a further blow to US President George W. Bush, Honduras followed Spain on Monday in announcing it will pull its troops out of the country.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and
RSS