South Korea is likely to raise the issue of Japan’s sexual enslavement of South Korean women during World War II, as part of diplomatic efforts to press the neighbor to come up with compensation measures, government sources said Monday.
Seoul may broach the issue of Korean women coerced to serve at front-line brothels for Japanese soldiers at a meeting of the United Nations’ Third Committee, a subsidiary organ dealing with social, cultural and humanitarian matters, according to the sources.
This will be part of Seoul’s continuing efforts to prod Japan to settle the demand by some former Korean sex slaves, euphemistically called “comfort women,” that Japan compensate and apologize for the enslavement.
As many as 200,000 Asian women, mostly Koreans, were believed to have been mobilized as sex slaves during World War II.
The South Korean government is also considering a plan to dispatch a higher-than-usual ranking ambassador to the committee session designated to discuss women’s issues from Oct. 11-16 at the U.N. headquarters in New York in order to add more pressure, the sources said.
“In the remarks at the Third Committee, the issue of comfort women for Japanese soldiers will be mentioned in a highly (critical) tone,” one of the sources said. “The exact wording will be determined later in accordance with the latest development.”
South Korea regards Japan as being hypocritical for vowing its commitment to the advancement of women’s rights in the world when it is turning a blind eye to the South Korean women’s demand of apology and compensation for its wartime atrocity.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged the advancement of women and announced that his government will spend about $3 billion over the next three years in official development assistance to help women’s participation in society and their empowerment in his address at the U.N. General Assembly last week.
Since 2011, Seoul has continued to press Japan to face up to the comfort women issue, commenting in the same Third Committee in 2011 that Japan is liable to compensate the sexual victims. Similar remarks were also made in the committee session last year. (Yonhap News)
