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Japanese Red Army founder Fusako Shigenobu free after 20 yrs, regrets ‘damage to innocent people’

New Delhi: Fusako Shigenobu, founder of the Japanese Red Army — once one of the most feared guerrilla groups in the world — was released from prison in Tokyo Saturday, after serving a 20-year sentence.

The 76-year-old, who had dreamt of a global socialist revolution and is believed to have coordinated several terror acts in tandem with Palestinian guerillas, expressed regret over her past actions after her release.

“It’s half a century ago … but we caused damage to innocent people who were strangers to us, by prioritising our battle, such as by hostage-taking,” she was quoted by The Guardian as saying.

Shigenobu was jailed on charges of coordinating the 1974 seizure of the French embassy in The Hague, Netherlands, in which an ambassador was taken hostage. The Japanese Red Army, under her command, was also responsible for the 1972 attack on Tel Aviv’s Lod airport, which killed over 20 people.

The group committed several other attacks and hostage crises, such as one on the US Consulate in Kuala Lumpur in 1975 and hijacking a Japan Airlines plane to North Korea in 1970, until Shigenobu’s arrest in Osaka in 2000.

The Japanese Red Army took responsibility of many of the attacks.

A former soy sauce company worker, Shigenobu had lived as a fugitive in the Middle East for nearly three decades, but had been living in Osaka under a false identity at the time of her arrest. She has a daughter, Mei, who was born and raised during Shigenobu’s years underground in the Middle East.


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Father’s history with ‘Ketsumeidan’

Shigenobu was born on 28 September, 1945, in Tokyo, a month after World War 2 ended, with Japan’s surrender to the US.

According to archival materials published by the National Library of Australia, her father “kept, unsuccessfully, a small shop” and in the 1930s, he was a part of the Ketsumeidan, a group of young men who “thought they could save Japan by killing corrupt businessmen and politicians”.

During her school years, Shigenobu had an interest in the Small Kindness Movement, described by the archival materials as “a Boy Scout-like, good-deed-a-day affair”.

While enrolled at Meiji University in Tokyo, she worked part time at a soy sauce company. It was at university that she was introduced introduced to the radical student movement of the 1960s in Japan, when protests and public opposition against the Japanese government’s relationship with the US was at a high.

Founded Japanese Red Army

In 1971, Shigenobu co-founded the Japanese Red Army, a communist militant organisation that was labelled a terrorist group by Japan and the US. The other co-founder was Tsuyoshi Okudaira, who was one of the gunmen of the Tel Aviv Airport attack and died during the incident.

In its early years, the group was known as the Arab-Red Army, owing to its ‘links’  with the ‘Palestinian guerillas’.

Samidoun, which describes itself as an international network of organisers and activists working to build solidarity with Palestinian prisoners in their struggle for freedom, has championed Shigenobu’s cause and has celebrated her recent release.

In a press release, it described her decision to travel to Lebanon in 1971, where she started working with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist organisation known for carrying out terror attacks and hijacks on Western targets.

Her main focus, according to Samidoun, was sending information about the Palestinian struggle to Japan, by writing reports for Japanese media, and corresponding with different activists and artists.

On 30 May, 1972, “three Japanese volunteers” carried out a “military operation” at Lydda Airport in Tel Aviv to target Aharon Katzir, who they believed was the “lead scientist for Israel’s biological weapons“.

Daughter Mei describes life as fugitives

In November 2000, while living under a false identity and disguised as a man, Shigenobu was arrested in Osaka. She was later sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Soon after her arrest, her daughter Mei who was 28 at the time, flew to Japan from Beirut. In an interview to the LA Times, Mei said her childhood was characterised by “frequent moves, aliases, a readiness to leave best friends behind at a moment’s notice and long periods of separation from her mother”.

She described how they were perpetually on the run from Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, which was intent on tracking them down after the Tel Aviv’s airport attack.

Mei’s father, whose identity has been kept a secret, is assumed to have been one of the fighters for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)


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Source: The Print

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