SEOUL/DAVOS, SWITZERLAND – South Korea is committed to advancing relations with Japan but will step up efforts to share with the world its experience of…
SEOUL/DAVOS, SWITZERLAND – South Korea is committed to advancing relations with Japan but will step up efforts to share with the world its experience of Japanese wartime atrocities, including sexual violence against its women, Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha said in an interview.
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 1910-1945 colonization of the Korean Peninsula, the use of wartime labor at Japanese companies, and the abuse of comfort women — many of them Korean — who provided sex to Japanese soldiers in wartime brothels, including those who did so against their will.
“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.
