Sakhalin Korean family members file for compensation

Posted on : 2012-08-07 14:50 KST Modified on : 2012-08-07 14:50 KST
Relatives caught in Cold War politics were left without South Korean nationality
 Russia
Russia

By Park Tae-woo, staff reporter

Family members of Koreans drafted as laborers on Sakhalin Island during Japanese colonial rule have filed suit against the state to demand compensation.

Meanwhile, a suit was also filed to confirm the citizenship of a child of mobilization victims who lacked nationality due to Soviet-era policy.

MINBYUN, or Lawyers for a Democratic Society, and the public interest lawyers’ group Gong-Gam announced Monday that 37 surviving family members of Sakhalin Koreans had filed suit with Seoul Administrative Court, asking for compensation from the Commission on Verification and Support for the Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism in Korea.

The individuals in question previously applied to the commission for legal compensation to mobilization victims. But their claims were dismissed, either because they did not possess South Korean nationality or because the victims had died after Sept. 30, 1990.

According to a special law enacted in 2010, compensation is only payable for people who died before 1990, the year diplomatic relations were established between South Korea and the Soviet Union, and non-South Koreans cannot apply. As a result, the victims’ children, who were forced to take Russian citizenship for economic reasons, are not entitled to any benefits.

In their complaint, the plaintiffs said, “The inability of Sakhalin Koreans to obtain South Korean citizenship is a matter stemming from Cold War-era diplomatic issues and the evasion of responsibility by the South Korean and Japanese governments, and cannot be passed off as the responsibility of the Sakhalin Koreans themselves.”

They also said it was in violation of constitutionally guaranteed equality to make distinctions in compensation payouts according to citizenship and time of death.

“The special law was based on armchair theories, without any practical consideration of why Sakhalin Koreans could not go home or recover their South Korean nationality,” they said.

“The standards for discrimination are arbitrary and in violation of the obligation to protect citizens overseas and the Constitutional spirit.”

Meanwhile, a 58-year-old identified as Kim filed suit with Seoul Administrative Court to have their nationality recognized. Kim was acting on the wishes of parents who were taken to Sakhalin Island in 1924 through forcible mobilization.

“According to a temporary ordinance for nationality enacted by the South Korean transitional government in 1948, because I was born to parents who became South Korean citizens with the enactment of the National Act, I obtained South Korean citizenship at birth,” Kim said.

The book “The Road Home Is the Road of Life,” a collection of letters by Sakhalin Koreans, includes a passage reading, “If two people were both drafted, the one who has South Korean citizenship gets compensation, while one with this country’s citizenship doesn’t. Does that make any sense? Do they think we’re Russian citizens because that’s what we wanted?”

 

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