NHK World-Japan reported today that in August 2014 a Japanese delegation from the countries health and welfare ministry visited eastern Siberia and collected the remains of 16 prisoners believed to be Japanese. Hundreds of thousands are believed to have died because of hard labor in the bitter Siberian cold while held in gulags and concentration camps in the Soviet Union, including 55,000 Japanese and 23,000 American POWs after World War II and another 7,800 U.S. soldiers still unaccounted for from the Korean War of the 1950s and Vietnam War of the 60s and 70s.
As late as 1992 Russian President Boris Yeltsin acknowledged that even some U.S. prisoners captured during the Vietnam War might still be alive during a NBC News interview, saying “Our archives have shown that it is true–some of them were transferred to the territory of the former U.S.S.R. and were kept in labor camps, We don’t have complete data and can only surmise that some of them may still be alive.”
Yeltsin spokesman Vyacheslav V. Kostikov told reporters “After the Vietnam War, a certain number of (American) military prisoners were in Russia. The president and the new democratic government are trying to do their utmost to find those people–to find the memory of those people, because most of them, of course, have already died. Nevertheless, when I asked the president, ‘Do you think that some of these people may still be alive?’ he said it’s not excluded that some of them are still alive.”
While Japans health and welfare ministry has retrieved the remains of 22,000 Japanese since 1991 using Russian cemetery records, a DNA expert told the ministry the remains of 14 out of the 16 POWs collected in 2014 were not Japanese during a closed-door session of the ministry last August.
The ministry has neither announced the findings nor has it determined what it will do with the remains and the Japanese DNA expert has even urged the ministry to return the remains to Russia, the regime responsible for the deaths. The Soviet Union used forced labor from many different nations and an effort should be made to finally determine who those 14 POWs are and return them to their respective countries.
Spin News Network 