hankyoreh

Investigators from the Seoul Western District Prosecutor’s Office during a search and seizure of the Korean Council’s House of Peace shelter in Seoul’s Mapo District on May 21. (Kim Hye-yun, staff photographer)

The allegations that have been raised about the use of donations to the House of Sharing and to the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Korean Council) presents a serious dilemma for many of the donors. Take, for example, a friend of mine who has been giving 30,000 won (US$24.23) a month ever since she started volunteering to do some cleaning at the House of Sharing 10 years ago.

“I made a point of keeping up the donations even after quitting my job and even when we ran short of money to send the kids to after-school activities,” she told me. But my friend didn’t categorically say she was going to stop donating. As it happens, I share her concerns.

For many people — especially women, and not only activists — the comfort women issue goes beyond a mere battle over right and wrong. It evokes a range of emotions — distress over the hardscrabble lives of those women who were horribly abused at such a tender age, amazement at how the world has embraced the issue of sexual violence by the state that those women have raised, and indebtedness to them for helping the narratives of feminism and sexual violence mature and expand. While the Korean Council and the House of Sharing are obviously different organizations, there’s no difference between the interest that donors have taken, and the support they have shown, in the former comfort women and their advocacy of human rights. That’s why many people have been following the accusations about the Korean Council with a complicated mixture of disappointment, regret, and concern.

A few days ago, such supporters — myself included — were shocked and hurt by a Facebook post written by a veteran activist for women’s rights. Though not herself a member of the Korean Council, this activist wrote that the council’s activities over the past 30 years were “worth more than 30 trillion won [US$24.2 billion].” The activist also said that while “the former comfort women and their families would have been satisfied by a mere payout,” activists had “persuaded them to demand a full investigation and a public apology and to have the matter covered in textbooks.”

Surely no one would doubt the dedication of the activists and the former comfort women during their 30 years with the Korean Council. But putting down the former comfort women to play up the council’s value amounts to giving a vigorous push to the council as it teeters on the edge of the cliff. When activists criticize the former comfort women in order to defend a movement that could never have gotten started without those women’s testimony, and when they condescendingly shrug off questions raised by their supporters, those activists are, ironically enough, only showing how self-righteous the movement has become.

It was with mixed feelings that I read the statement released on May 20 by some of the founding members of what was formerly called the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. The veteran activists who signed the statement are the ones who spent their own money and went to great lengths to find the former comfort women at a time when the word “comfort woman” was virtually unknown, the ones who shed tears with those women for the wounds they’d suffered and who restored a history that had been erased.

As I’ve already said, there are few who would disagree that, thanks to the courage of the former comfort women and the passion of the activists, the former comfort women stopped being passive victims and became energetic activists for human rights. Nor can we deny the dedication of Yoon Mee-hyang, former chair of the Korean Council and a key member since its earliest days. I completely understand that those veterans are concerned, as the Korean Council scandal spins out of control, that everything the comfort women movement has struggled to achieve over the past 30 years will be undone. But it’s too late now to heed their appeal for trust and patience. It’s a shame that Yoon and the Korean Council couldn’t have been quicker to provide a candid explanation.

Needless to say, there are groups that see this scandal as a chance to overturn the historical narrative of the compulsory mobilization of the comfort women and everything that they suffered. There’s a malicious and opportunistic scheme underway to blame the Korean Council for the failure of the comfort women agreement reached by South Korea and Japan in 2015. The press has also been having a field day with cheap shots: in one interview, the family members of a former comfort woman who had nothing to do with the movement seemed as angry as they were ignorant of the facts; in another, someone claimed that only one surviving comfort woman is living at the Korean Council’s House of Peace shelter in Seoul’s Mapo District.

The Korean Council and the comfort women activists don’t need to reason with such people. There have always been those who seek to insult and topple the comfort women movement, and they are simply taking full advantage of these favorable circumstances. But there are many more people who, while not being activists themselves, have cherished the movement, felt gratitude to its members, and provided their support. The donations that have poured into the Korean Council and the House of Sharing over the years bear testimony to that. Such people have questions, and they deserve some sincere answers from the Korean Council and Yoon. That’s the way to protect the comfort women movement’s legacy over the past 30 years and to make it even stronger in the years to come.

By Kim Eun-hyoung, editorial writer

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