South Korean panel: Japan sex slave deal failed victims

2015 deal applauded by U.S., criticized in South Korea.

A SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — South Korean government-ap- pointed panel faulted on Wednesday a “final and irreversible” deal struck with Japan in 2015 to resolve a decades-old dispute over Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery during World War II.

The panel’s findings offer President Moon Jae-in a potential opportunity to change or even scrap the agreement reached between Japan and his predecessor as president, Park Geun-hye.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha said her ministry “humbly” accepted the panel’s conclusion that the government had failed to represent the victims’ demands when negotiating the deal.

“As foreign minister, I bow my head deeply, expressing regrets for causing pains for the victims and their fami- lies, their advocacy groups and the people in general,” Kang said.

Though the 2015 agreement was applauded by the United States, it was widely criticized in South Korea.

In the deal, which both governments at the time called a “final and irreversible” set- tlement, Japan expressed responsibility and made a new apology to the victims, promising an $8.3 million fund to help provide oldage care. In return, South Korea promised not to criticize Tokyo on the issue again.

But some of the women complained that the deal had ignored their demands that Japan take “legal” respon- sibility and provide official reparations.

Kang said the government would not make a final decision until it had consulted again with the women and their families, and considered the ramifications of changing or scrapping the deal for relations with Japan.

In Tokyo, Foreign Minister Taro Kono warned that any attempt to revise the agreement would be “unaccept- able” and would make the relationship between Japan and South Korea “unmanageable.”

“The Japan-South Korea agreement is an agreement between the two governments and one that has been highly appreciated by international society,” Kono said on Wednesday. Both countries are crucial allies of the United States.

Park, whose government engineered the 2015 deal, was impeached by the South Korean Parliament in Decem- ber 2016 on charges of corrup- tion and abuses of presiden- tial power. She was formally deposed through a Constitu- tional Court ruling in March.

Her government’s agreement on women forced into sexual slavery, euphe- mistically known as comfort women, has proved deeply unpopular at home. Some survivors have vehe- mently opposed it, as did a majority of South Koreans, according to recent surveys. During the presidential elec- tion campaign, Moon and the other candidates all said they would review the agreement if elected.

The legacy of sexual slav- ery remains one of the most intractable disputes resulting from Japan’s colonization of Korea from 1910 to its World War II defeat in 1945.

Historians say that at least tens of thousands of women, many of them Korean, were lured or coerced to work in brothels catering to the Japanese army from the early 1930s until 1945. The Korean women who survived the war lived mostly in silence because of the stigma, and many never married. A total of 238 women have come forward in South Korea since the early 1990s, of whom 36 are still alive.

“A victims-centered approach, which has become the international norm when it comes to the wartime women’s rights, has not been sufficiently reflected, and the deal was reached through give-and-take negotiations as in an ordinary diplomatic issue,” the South Korean panel said in its report released on Wednesday. “The agreement was finalized mostly based on government views without adequately taking into account the opinions of victims.”

Since taking office in May, Moon has said that most South Koreans could not emotionally accept the 2015 deal, but he has stopped short of saying he wanted to scrap it. Instead, his government appointed a panel of private and governmental experts in July to review the diplomatic negotiations that led to the agreement.

The deal has presented Moon with a political and diplomatic challenge.

His progressive supporters want him to revise or terminate it. But just as Park was, Moon is under pressure from Washington and even within South Korea to improve ties with Japan, so they can better contend with North Korea’s growing nuclear threats.

While in office, Park initially refused to meet with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, and repeatedly urged Tokyo to address the issue before relations could improve. But as South Korea’s frosty relations with Japan became a burden, her government too hastily sought a deal to break the diplomatic logjam, the panel said.

Park’s office spearheaded the negotiations, but the results were contentious enough for the Foreign Ministry to recommend that South Korea not call the agreement “irreversible” in the final draft, the panel said. That suggestion was rejected by Park’s office, it said.