hankyoreh

Former comfort woman Lee Yong-su strokes a chair with a portrait of former comfort woman Lee Soon-deok

A human rights report published by the UN Committee against Torture on May 12 recommended revising the comfort women agreement reached by the South Korean and Japanese governments in 2015. As reasons, it mentioned a failure “to provide redress and reparation, including compensation and the means for as full rehabilitation as possible as well as the right to truth and assurances of non-repetition.” The UN Committee against Torture is affiliated with the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, and while the report may not be legally binding, we can still sense the gravity of the UN’s first assessment of the comfort women agreement.

who passed away in April at the age of 99

The agreement was reached by the Park Geun-hye administration in Dec. 2015 without the consent of the survivors actually affected by the issue. Without offering any apology worthy of the term, the Japanese government provided one billion yen (US$8.8 million) to a comfort women foundation and pronounced the agreement “final and irreversible.” Now Tokyo is using the agreement to pressure Seoul into having comfort women statues removed. This humiliating agreement is one of the most painful of the Park administration’s many examples of misrule.

In a May 11 telephone conversation with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, South Korean President Moon Jae-in made it clear that a “majority of South Koreans do not accept” the comfort women agreement. Overturning the agreement is one of Moon’s ten pledges, although it won’t be easy to pull off. Still, it’s more or less impossible to expect the existing agreement to lead to any historic changes in relations with Japan. It’s an issue we‘re going to have to resolve with patience and a long-term perspective, even if it takes some time. South Korea and Japan are obliged to cooperate in many ways on Northeast Asian political and economic matters. We need to take a lesson from the hot-and-cold approach of the Park administration, which seemed ready to sever ties with Tokyo early on before it suddenly entered negotiations on the comfort women issue. The Moon administration will have to adopt a two-track strategy of pursuing economic and other collaboration without backing down on the comfort women issue.

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