A 93-year-old survivor of the Japanese military's wartime brothels is trying to persuade the governments of South Korea and Japan to jointly bring the issue of forced prostitution during World War II to the United Nations.
The 93-year-old is the face of a dwindling group of South Korean sexual slavery survivors who have been demanding since the early 1990s that theHer latest – and possibly final – push is to persuade the governments of South Korea and Japan to settle theirLee leads an international group of sexual slavery survivors and advocates – including those from the Philippines, China, Indonesia, Australia and East Timor –to press Seoul and Tokyo to jointly refer the issue to U.N.
“Both South Korea and Japan keep waiting for us to die, but I will fight until the very end,” Lee said in a recent interview at The Associated Press office in Seoul, across the street from the Japanese Embassy. She said her campaign is aimed at pressuring Japan to fully accept responsibility and acknowledge its past military sexual slavery as war crimes and properly educate its public about the abuses, through textbooks and memorials.
Still, the countries may find it difficult to focus on the future if they can’t narrow their disagreements over the past. Lee and other survivors said Seoul officials didn’t consult them before making the deal, under which Japan agreed to contribute 1 billion yen to a South Korean fund to help support the victims. They questioned the sincerity of the Japanese government — then led by right-wing Prime Minster Shinzo Abe, who had long been accused by South Koreans of sanitizing Japan’s war crimes — because Japanese officials stressed the payments shouldn’t be considered as compensation.
Japan has repeatedly expressed regret over its wartime actions. It conducted a study of the practice and established a fund from private contributions in 1995 to compensate victims in the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan before it expired in 2007. showing the use of coercion in the recruitment of the so-called “comfort women” and refuses to describe the system as sexual slavery. Tokyo has urged Seoul to abide by the 2015 agreement and described recent lawsuits filed by South Korean sexual slavery victims seeking compensation as “extremely regrettable and absolutely unacceptable.”
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