S. Korean lawmakers urge N. Korea to return POWs

On the eve of the 63rd anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean war, the South Korean parliament on Monday passed a resolution calling on North Korea to repatriate former service members who were taken there after the war.

In the resolution adopted by the Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee of the National Assembly during its plenary session, the lawmakers urged Pyongyang to "instantly send Korean war prisoners back home" and to "accept Seoul's request for cooperation to resolve relevant issues."

Some 500 former South Korean soldiers are believed to be alive in the North after being taken as prisoners of war (POWs) during the 1950-53 Korean War. Pyongyang, however, claims it is holding no POWs and all former South Korean soldiers voluntarily defected.

Expressing concern that the prisoners have allegedly been abused by the communist regime, the parliament also pushed the South Korean government to "employ every possible means including holding dialogues with the North to resolve the problems."

"Considering the fact that most of the prisoners there are more than 80 years old now, the (South Korean) government has no luxury to sit idle," the committee members said in the resolution, calling on it to devise concrete measures for their repatriation.

The war ended in a cease-fire, not a peace treaty, leaving the two Koreas technically still at war.

The committee also endorsed a resolution, denouncing Japanese leaders including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for their controversial remarks and actions justifying its wartime sexual enslavement of women from neighboring countries and asking for an official apology and compensation.

In May, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe angered Koreans by suggesting that Tokyo's colonization of the Korean Peninsula was not an act of aggression, while Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto claimed that Japan's World War II soldiers needed sex slaves mobilized from Korea and other Asian nations to provide comfort at front-line brothels.

"We urge Japan to make an official apology and a legal compensation for female victims in order to recover their reputation," the committee said in the resolution, urging Abe, Hashimoto and other politicians "to publicly apologize for their ludicrous words and deeds."

Up to 200,000 women, mostly Koreans, were coerced into sexual servitude at front-line Japanese brothels during World War II when the Korean Peninsula was a Japanese colony, according to historians. Those sex slaves were euphemistically called "comfort women."

Japan insists that all compensation issues were covered under the 1965 Treaty of Basic Relations between South Korea and Japan, shattering Seoul's efforts to repair bilateral ties. 

In a separate resolution, the committee also urged Tokyo to correct its distorted history textbooks laying claim to the South Korean islets of Dokdo. The move came after Japan approved 21 high-school textbooks, some of which describe Dokdo, a group of rocky outcroppings lying in the East Sea between the two countries, as a Japanese territory. 

Japan has long laid claim to Dokdo in the country's school textbooks, government reports and through other avenues, stoking enmity in South Korea against its former colonial ruler. South Korea effectively controls the islets with a small police detachment, which has been there since 1954.

(Yonhap News)