Report: Malaysian leader urges China and Japan to make amends

Report: Malaysian leader urges China and Japan to make amends
Saturday April 23, 6:10 PM
Report: Malaysian leader urges China and Japan to make amends
Malaysia's leader on Saturday urged Beijing and Tokyo to resolve their dispute over Japan's wartime past and violent anti-Japanese protests in China, a news report said.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi also said he believed Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's apology on Friday for his country's wartime atrocities had been generally well received, the national news agency Bernama reported.

Relations between China and Japan have plunged to a three-decade low, with massive anti-Japanese protests erupting in several Chinese cities over Japanese textbooks critics say gloss over Tokyo's past militarism and its bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

Speaking earlier Saturday at the Boao Forum on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, the Malaysian premier added that it was important to remember the bigger picture.

"For that, China and Japan must move on in their cooperation for the development of East Asia and play their part in the bigger process and platform of ASEAN+3," he was quoted as saying, referring to a grouping which includes the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and China, Japan and South Korea.

Koizumi and Chinese President Hu Jintao are due to meet Saturday on the sidelines of the Asian-African Summit in Jakarta in an effort to defuse the tensions, officials said. ADVERTISEMENT



Abdullah, who is now at the Jakarta summit, said he was confident that the leaders of China and Japan would be able to sit down together and resolve their differences.

"We in ASEAN certainly value not only peace and stability in the Southeast Asia region but also in East Asia and also the Pacific," Bernama quoted him as saying