Japan, China to seek extension of chemical weapons disposal
(Kyodo)
Updated: 2006-04-17 09:11 Japan and China will together request next week
that a U.N. organization give them five more years to complete a project to
collect and dispose of abandoned wartime chemical weapons in China after finding
it impossible to meet a 2007 deadline, Japanese government sources said Sunday.
Chinese and Japanese experts,
wearing protective gears, work at a excavation site at Touzhan Village in
the Ang'angxi District of Qiqihar, Northeast China's Heilongjiang
Province, where chemical bombs left by invading Japanese troops during
World War II were found. [newsphoto] |
The two
governments will request the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons to extend the deadline to spring of 2012 as there are still an estimated
300,000 to 400,000 shells in Dunhua, Jilin Province, left by the former Imperial
Japanese Army at the end of World War II, they said.
Japan has collected and disposed of about 40,000 shells in China since 2000
under the Chemical Weapons Convention that requires it, but large portions of
the abandoned shells remain untreated in the Harbaling area in Dunhua due to a
delay in work to construct essential disposal facilities in the area.
The Chinese government has not given permission to the Japanese government's
plan to build the facilities in the city, and the Cabinet Office has cited the
Chinese side's difficulty in deciding which administrative branch will deal with
the unprecedented project.
Japan has ratified the convention, which came into force on April 29, 1997.
The treaty requires contracting states to remove within a decade chemical
weapons they left in other contracting states.
Contracting states can also extend the deadline by submitting a request by a
year before the deadline under the treaty.
Japan and China reached an agreement in July 1999 that stated Japan would
provide money, technology and facilities to collect and dispose of abandoned
weapons within China.
Collection and disposal of chemical weapons in China is an urgent issue for
Japan as a number of Chinese people have been killed or injured by toxic gas
leaking from dumped shells on various occasions, such as while working at
construction sites, in the postwar era.
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