hankyoreh

The Statue of Peace in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul on May 10. (Yonhap News)

Former comfort woman Lee Yong-su created a stir when she took issue with the use of donations to the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Korean Council) during a press conference last week. Lee has been one of the most vocal of the surviving comfort women, who were forced into sexual slavery by the imperial Japanese army.

During the press conference, Lee expressed her dissatisfaction with the Korean Council and with Yoon Mee-hyang, her colleague of 30 years and former council chair, who was recently elected to the National Assembly as a proportional representative for the Together Citizens’ Party. Unfortunately, Lee’s press conference has caused allegations to be raised about the larger comfort women movement spearheaded by Lee and the other former comfort women.

During a press conference on Monday, the Korean Council explained that it had used an average of 41% of donations to support the surviving comfort women and the rest of the money to fund comfort women research, commemorative programs, and history education. While the opposition party and conservative press raised accusations about how Yoon paid for her daughter’s studies in the US, Yoon explained that the money had come from several sources, including damages paid to her husband, who’d been framed on espionage charges, after his partial exoneration in a retrial.

The Korean Council and Yoon need to respond in detail to the allegations that have been raised so that the truth can come out, and they should take this opportunity to rectify any inadequacies in the council’s operations. But any politically motivated scheme to use Lee’s remarks as an excuse to undermine the comfort women movement as a whole must be firmly rejected.

The opposition party and the conservative press appear to be attacking Yoon in the hope of justifying the comfort women agreement that the Park Geun-hye administration reached with Japan on Dec. 28, 2015. In their telling of the story, Yoon had received preliminary information about the details of the comfort women agreement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) but had failed to share that information with the former comfort women, effectively sabotaging the agreement.

But according to a report prepared by a MOFA task force that reviewed the case, the government had made contact with the comfort women groups but hadn’t provided a detailed explanation of key points of the agreement, such as its claim to be a “final and irreversible solution” or its demand for “people in the community to refrain from criticizing Japan.”

It must be remembered that the comfort women movement doesn’t belong to any single individual or organization, but is a global campaign for human rights that rests on the toil of numerous comfort women, activists, and ordinary people over the past 30 years.

The women who’d been forced to remain silent for so many years about the terrible things they’d suffered at the hands of the Japanese troops were finally able to speak in the 1990s, after Korea’s democratization; in partnership with activists, those women brought about historic changes. Their efforts have been supported by countless others, including human rights activists around the country and the young students who have taken part in the weekly Wednesday demonstrations.

Civic groups in both South Korea and Japan have joined forces to resist the rightward shift in Japan, where the government is attempting to deny the facts of history. The former comfort women have also joined hands with women who have suffered sexual violence in various global conflicts. All these efforts have coalesced into a universal campaign to prevent sexual violence in wartime, and this campaign has established itself in the UN and other parts of the international community.

We must listen carefully to what Lee has to say, but we must not tolerate attempts to exploit her comments. Korean society ought to take this controversy as an opportunity to further reflect on the significance of the comfort women movement and to move forward in concert toward the ultimate goal: a solution that’s grounded in Japan’s sincere remorse and apology and healing for the victims.

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]