hankyoreh

Yoon Mee-hyang

After the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced its plans to establish a foundation with Japan to support the former comfort women for the Japanese Imperial Army as part of implementing the agreement reached with Japan on Dec. 28, the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Jeongdaehyeop) declared that it would not cooperate. “The government appears to be trying to lure the former comfort women with money that the Japanese government has clearly stated is not legal compensation,” Jeongdaehyeop said.

On May 11, during the weekly Wednesday demonstration in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul’s Jongno district, Jeongdaehyeop announced that it would not accept the government‘s plan to establish the foundation. “First the South Korean government reached its own agreement with the Japanese while ignoring the requests of the former comfort women, and now officials are going around meeting the women and their families and telling them lies about how the Japanese government made an official apology,” the group said.

“There is something suspicious about how the South Korean government is taking action on behalf of the Japanese government, which is calling for the removal of the state of the comfort women statue and not even mentioning the 1 billion yen (US$8.30 million) it has promised to provide,” Jeongdaehyeop said in a position statement published the day before.

Jeongdaehyeop contends that the Dec. 28 agreement was a “slapdash deal” that failed to reflect the demands of the former comfort women and the groups that support them.

“With the help of the public, we are working to establish the Justice and Memory Foundation for the former comfort women. Through this foundation, we will bring about justice for these women, restore their reputations and their human rights and find out the truth - things that the South Korean and Japanese governments have been avoiding,” the group said.

Prior to this, South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it would launch a preparatory committee sometime in May to establish a foundation to assist the former comfort women. The Ministry said that the 1 billion yen in funding from the Japanese government would mostly be used to support the women.

By Park Soo-jin, staff reporter

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