25 years of progress on comfort women issue “wiped out” by new agreement

Posted on : 2015-12-30 18:24 KST Modified on : 2015-12-30 18:24 KST
Support group’s co-representative says Monday’s settlement doesn’t reflect the will of the comfort women, vows to seek its invalidation

“Overnight, the South Korean government erased the progress that the former comfort women and civic groups had made over the past 25 years toward settling the issue of the comfort women,” said Yoon Mee-hyang, co-representative of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Jeongdaehyeop).

Yoon Mee-hyang
Yoon Mee-hyang

“We are going to tell people around the world that the settlement does not reflect the will of the former comfort women, and we will also review legal options for invalidating the settlement,” Yoon told the Hankyoreh on Dec. 29, when asked about the results of the recent meeting between the foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan.

Since Jeongdaehyeop was launched in 1990, Yoon has led the civic movement that works with the former comfort women to demand that the Japanese government make an official apology, acknowledge its legal responsibility, and pay the reparations that this would entail. After a press conference by civic groups that was held Tuesday in front of South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Sejong Street in Seoul, Yoon told reporters that she felt betrayed by the South Korean government.

“Because of the provision in the 1965 treaty between South Korea and Japan that said that the issue of reparations had been completely resolved, the Koreans who were conscripted for labor during Japan’s occupation of Korea have not even had the right to sue the Japanese government. Considering that South Korea’s Constitutional Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for the government not to try to resolve the dispute about the former comfort women’s right to make claims, it ought to have done a proper job. Instead, the two countries reached an irreversible and final settlement in which they make contradictory claims about acknowledging responsibility for the comfort women issue,” Yoon said.

Yoon took particular exception to the fact that Jeongdaehyeop and the former comfort women had not been told anything during the negotiations about what was being discussed.

“We felt positively about the fact that the South Korean government had carried out 10 rounds of bureau chief-level talks with the Japanese, and we trusted that the government understood the perspective of the former comfort women. I was a fool to trust the government,” Yoon said.

“Since the comfort women who first told their stories have all passed away, they can’t even demand to know why the government handled the negotiations like this,” Yoon said sorrowfully, recalling the testimony of Kim Hak-sun in 1991, which opened the doors for public discussion of the comfort women issue.

The civic movement to find a solution to the issue of the comfort women - which is now 25 years old - has received high praise from around the world. In 2010, Rashida Manjoo, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women for the UN Human Rights Council, described it as “the most organized and adequately verified of any movement calling for compensation for crimes against women in wartime.”

“The South Korean government wiped out the progress of a movement whose successes had been recognized around the world,” Yoon said.

“Our partner organizations outside the country are sending us congratulatory messages, mistakenly thinking that the former comfort women agreed to the settlement. We will inform them that this settlement was made without the consent of the former comfort women and without any acknowledgement of legal responsibility, and we will undertake a legal review of whether the settlement can be nullified,” she added.

Despite the government’s settlement, Yoon said that she is planning to carry on the struggle. The weekly Wednesday demonstration for resolving the issue of the comfort women will be held at noon on Dec. 30 in front of the Japanese embassy as usual, she said.

As the group has done every year, the final Wednesday demonstration of the year will consist of a memorial service for the former comfort women who have passed away this year. Nine of the women died in 2015, which brings the number of surviving women down to 46, from a total of 238.

By Park Tae-woo, staff reporter

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