Emotional reunion for US 'deserter' and wife

An American accused of deserting the army 40 years ago and fleeing to North Korea spent his first full day with his Japanese wife today after an emotional reunion.

Charles Robert Jenkins and his two daughters were reunited with Hitomi Soga at Jakarta’s international airport yesterday before going to a five-star downtown hotel.

Japanese government spokesman Kyoko Nakayama said today that the couple “talked long into the night but did not have any specific discussions about the future”.

“The furthest they have looked into the future is to talk about whether to cook spaghetti for lunch,” she told reporters.

Indonesia was chosen as the site of the reunion because it has no extradition treaty with the United States, which is seeking Jenkins on desertion charges.

Japanese officials had convinced Jenkins that he was safe from US prosecution here.

Jakarta has said the family can stay as long as it wants, but Soga reportedly wants to persuade her husband to return to Japan, where he could potentially be extradited.

The family was kept out of sight of reporters in a suite in the Intercontinental Hotel, but Soga released a statement saying she was “sincerely happy that the four of us could spend this precious time as a family in this beautiful tropical country”.

The drama has captivated Japan, and led to charges that the reunion was engineered by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to offset his sagging popularity before parliamentary elections on Sunday. The government denies the charges.

It could also pose a dilemma for US President George Bush. With more than 140,000 troops in Iraq, pardoning Jenkins could be unpopular and risks angering veterans in the run-up to November presidential elections.

About 200 Japanese journalists have flown in to cover the reunion. The Japanese government is footing the bill for the visit, including chartering a special plane to fly Jenkins and his daughters from Pyongyang to Jakarta.

The reunion is the latest chapter in a bizarre saga.

Soga was abducted by North Korean spies in 1978. She had not seen her husband and daughters since 2002, when North Korea allowed her to return home along with four other Japanese kidnap victims.

Jenkins did not accompany her, fearful that he could be extradited to the United States and tried for desertion. Their teenage daughters decided to stay with their father.

Jenkins was serving in a US Army unit based on the Demilitarised Zone between the two Koreas when he disappeared during a routine patrol in 1965.

On Friday, the slender, 64-year-old wore a pin bearing the image of Kim Il Sung, the late founder of North Korea who is the subject of a personality cult.

While in North Korea, Jenkins is known to have taught English and played an American villain in government propaganda movies. It appears he led a relatively privileged life in the poverty-stricken and reclusive communist country.

He met and married Soga in 1980 in Pyongyang. Soga spent nearly a quarter-century in North Korea before leader Kim Jong Il agreed with Koizumi two years ago to allow her to return home.

Japan’s top government spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda, said Tokyo recently repeated its request for the United States not to push for his extradition.

“But Washington’s response has been rather severe,” he said at a news conference in Tokyo. “There’s still a possibility that the situation could change, but I can’t comment on that now.”

In Jakarta last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell said charges against Jenkins “remain outstanding” but that he understood that Japan considered the reunion a ”humanitarian” issue.

The reunion also raised the possibility of warmer ties between North Korea and Japan, which are participants in periodic, six-nation talks in Beijing aimed at ending Pyongyang’s development of nuclear weapons.

Koizumi, who went to North Korea in May to meet Kim Jong Il, said last week that he wants to normalise ties with North Korea within a year. But he stressed the North must first scrap its atomic agenda and come clean about past abductions of Japanese citizens.