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Lawyers from MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society and former comfort women hold a press conference at Our House of Peace

The South Korean government has reportedly decided to use most of the 1 billion yen (US$8.30 million) that the Japanese government agreed to donate in the recent comfort women settlement not for memorial projects for the former comfort women but as direct aid that will be given to the individual women in the form of cash and benefits.

The settlement, which the governments of President Park Geun-hye of South Korea and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan reached on Dec. 28, is supposed to permanently resolve the issue of the comfort women, who were forced to serve as sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army.

According to the terms of the Dec. 28 agreement, it is the South Korean government’s responsibility to establish a charitable foundation for the comfort women. If the 1 billion yen that the Japanese government is supposed to donate to the foundation is mostly used to provide payments and benefits to the individual women, this means that South Korea will have to cover the cost not only of establishing the foundation but also of most of its operations and programs, which is likely to provoke objections that this goes against the spirit of the settlement.

In the Dec. 28 settlement, the two governments agreed that South Korea “would ”establish a foundation for the purpose of providing support for the former comfort women, that its funds [1 billion yen] [would] be contributed by the Government of Japan as a one-time contribution through its budget, and that projects for recovering the honor and dignity and healing the psychological wounds of all former comfort women [would] be carried out under the cooperation between the Government of Japan and the Government of the ROK.“

”We will be running these programs so that the 1 billion yen that the Japanese government is to donate to the foundation will go to providing benefits for the individual women rather than to paying for general memorial or commemorative programs,“ a senior official with South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on the afternoon of Feb. 4.

”Rather than dividing the money between the women, we’re going to use it to provide them with individual benefits. This could mean, for example, providing them with caregivers, covering their medical bills or giving them cash payments,“ the official said. ”The situation is such that more elaborate deliberations need to be held before I can provide more detailed plans.“

The official described memorial and commemorative programs as ones in which ”the benefits would not go to the individual women,“ hinting that the 1 billion yen that the Japanese government is to donate to the foundation would not be used for such purposes.

This means that, in order to move forward with projects such as the construction of the memorial that 1st Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Lim Sung-nam told the former comfort women about during a visit to a center run by the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Jeongdaehyeop) in the Mapo District of Seoul on Dec. 29 of last year, South Korea would have to foot most of the bill.

”Since the Japanese government cannot make a payment to the foundation until the foundation is established, South Korea has to pay the cost of establishing the foundation,“ the official said, while avoiding any direct comments on the question of how the government would cover the cost of running the foundation and its programs after its establishment. Practically speaking, however, it appears inevitable that the South Korean government will have to allocate a substantial amount of money for these purposes.

If the South Korean government were to distribute the 1 billion yen that Tokyo has agreed to pay among the 238 women who registered with the government as comfort women (including 192 who are deceased), this would amount to 42.77 million won (US$35,710) per person. This is less than the 43 million won (US$35,923) that the government paid the women as part of a law that established a special subsidy for them.

In related news, during the three weeks between Jan. 11 and Jan. 29, officials from South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs paid visits to the residences of 18 of the 28 former comfort women who live on their own in South Korea and explained the settlement to them. Of the women, 14 reacted positively, the Ministry said.

But the 10 women who are living at the House of Sharing in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province - a facility that provides community living arrangements for the former comfort women - and the three women who are living at the center run by Jeongdaehyeop have generally refused to accept the settlement and want it to be renegotiated.

By Lee Je-hun, staff reporter

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