Arafat Hasan of DOT
Amid rising political tension with Japan, South Korea has step up efforts to share with the world its experience of their neighbor’s wartime atrocities, including sexual violence against its women, Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha told Reuters. Kang said South Korea was seeking to host an international conference on sexual violence in conflict in the first half of this year. “We feel we have a lot to contribute to the discussion because we have the history of the comfort women and the victims,” she said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The two Asian neighbors share a bitter history stemming from Japan’s 1910-45 colonization of the Korean peninsula, the use of forced labor at Japanese companies, and the abuse of ‘comfort women’ – Japan’s euphemism for girls and women, many of them Korean, who were forced to work in its military brothels during World War Two.
“The conference is not to address (the comfort women) issue per se, but to make sure that their historical experience is not lost, and (is) registered in the international efforts to really come to terms with this issue,” Kang said.
The rows over wartime history have long been a stumbling block in relations between South Korea and Japan – two US allies engaged in global efforts to curb North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Kang said that despite a “very difficult history”, Seoul would take a “two-track approach” to resolve the historical disputes while boosting cooperation on North Korea and security.
The feud has deepened in recent months after South Korean courts ordered Japanese firms to compensate former laborers, and Tokyo accused a South Korean destroyer of having locked a radar on a Japanese surveillance plane.
Japan maintains that the issue of forced labor was fully settled in 1965 when the two countries restored diplomatic ties, and has called the court rulings “unthinkable.”
-Source: Reuters