Many parts of the country are still haunted by the ghosts of a
war that ended 61 years ago.
The threat posed by these weapons, particularly chemical ones,
which were left by Japanese invaders, remains real and
imminent.
This large amount of munitions has turned China into the world's
largest stockpile of abandoned chemical weapons.
Official statistics show that Japan dumped at least 2 million
tons of chemical weapons in about 40 sites in 15 provinces across
the country, with a large proportion in the northeast.
On Wednesday, experts from the two countries started a four-day
job to dig and collect abandoned chemical weapons. Thirty-one
Japanese bombs, with seven confirmed to be chemical weapons, were
recovered on Wednesday in Ning'an, northeast China's Heilongjiang
Province.
In the past nine years, China and Japan have worked together on
more than 60 occasions to investigate, evacuate, retrieve and pack
dumped chemical weapons. As a result, 37,499 chemical weapons and
200 tons of contaminated objects have been collected. However, not
a single item in these collections has been destroyed.
The unearthed weapons and the ones that remain buried somewhere
in our land pose a big potential danger to our people and
environment.
A total of 2,000 Chinese people have fallen victim to Japanese
chemical weapons over the past decades.
The governments of the two countries signed a memorandum in
1999, in which Japan agreed to provide all necessary funds,
equipment and personnel for the retrieval and destruction of all
abandoned Japanese chemical weapons in China by 2007.
The deadline is short and difficult to meet.
Japan has so far been slow in clearing up the weapons buried or
discarded by its troops after their defeat in 1945.
The abandoned Japanese weapons contained chemical agents, mostly
mustard gas, as well as hydrogen cyanide, phosgene, arsenic and a
blistering agent called lewisite. All of these are poisonous
agents.
It is Japan's responsibility to speed up the job of removing all
the chemical weapons left in China so that our people and soil will
be free from danger.
These abandoned weapons are a tangible reminder of Japanese
aggression during World War II.
Clearing them up as soon as possible is Japan's responsibility
and part of its soul-searching for the war against China.
The onus is on Japan to provide China adequate information on
the weapons it dumped in our country.
A lack of information from Tokyo about where Japanese troops
abandoned or buried their weapons has made it difficult to account
for them.
If Japan does not want to be haunted by this ghost of history,
it should completely destroy all these weapons as soon as
possible.
Japan needs to match its promises with action.
(China Daily July 7, 2006)
