16 January 2003 00:00
ON RUSSIAN-JAPANESE RELATIONS AT INTER-PARLIAMENTARY LEVEL
Russian parliamentarians are ready for broad and fruitful cooperation with their Japanese colleagues, First Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council of the Russian Federal Assembly Valery Goreglyad said at the end of a meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi. During the conversation, which took place on January 11 at the Japanese embassy in Moscow, the heads of the committees of the houses of the Russian parliament took part.
"The very fact of such a meeting indicates how much attention the Japanese Prime Minister pays to the strengthening of Russian-Japanese relations at the inter-parliamentary level," Goreglyad said. Special attention at the meeting was devoted to questions of cultural, humanitarian and economic cooperation, he noted. "The topic of the territorial disputes, touched on in the course of the conversation, was not dominant. It is remarkable that today the question of the disputed territories is not as acute as it was before," said the First Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council.
Goreglyad expressed the confidence that with the development of economic relations between Russia and Japan many political questions can also be solved in the long term.
Touching on the Plan of Action, signed the day before by the Russian President and the Japanese Prime Minister, Goreglyad stressed: "The Plan of Action is very important from both the political and economic points of view. And beneath this Plan there is a real foundation, because it did not emerge from scratch." This document as distinct from those signed between Russia and Japan previously, incorporates items of cooperation in the scientific and defense fields, noted the First Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council. "Relations between the two countries after its signing can be expected to develop even more dynamically in all areas," he said.
Touching on the question of the disputed territories, Goreglyad said Russia under no circumstances would give up the four islands, to which Japan is laying claim. At the same time he stressed that it was extremely important that relations between the two states should not become hostage to the territorial problem.
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