Victims seek justice as time runs out

SEOUL－Thirty years after going public with her story of abduction, rape and forced prostitution by Japan's wartime military, Lee Yong-soo fears she is running out of time to get closure to her ordeal.

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 the Japanese government fully accept culpability and offer an unequivocal apology.

Her latest－and possibly final－push is to persuade the governments of South Korea and Japan to settle their decadeslong impasse over sexual slavery by seeking judgment of the United Nations.

Lee leads an international group of sexual slavery survivors and advocates－including those from the Philippines, China, Indonesia, Australia and East Timor－that sent a petition to UN human rights investigators last week to press Seoul and Tokyo to jointly refer the issue to the UN's International Court of Justice. The group wants Seoul to initiate arbitration proceedings against Japan with a UN panel on torture if Tokyo does not agree to bring the case to the ICJ.

It is unclear whether South Korea, which will swear in a new government in May, will consider bringing the matter to the UN when it faces pressure to improve relations with Japan amid a turbulent time in global affairs. The country has never fought a case under such proceedings, and anything less than a lopsided victory might be seen at home as a defeat.

It is hard for Lee to be patient when other survivors are dying.

She worries about their plight being forgotten or distorted by Japan's apparent efforts to downplay the coercive and violent nature of World War II's sexual slavery and exclude it from schoolbooks.

She cried as she described how she was dragged from her home as a 16-year-old to serve as a sex slave for the Imperial Japanese Army, and the harsh abuse she endured at a Japanese military brothel in Taiwan until the end of the war－a story she first told in 1992.

"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.

Grievances over sexual slavery, forced labor and other abuses stemming from Japan's brutal colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula before the end of World War II have strained Seoul-Tokyo relations in recent years.

Years of bilateral diplomatic talks were largely fruitless. A haphazard settlement reached between the countries' foreign ministers in 2015－including Fumio Kishida, the current prime minister of Japan－never lived up to its goal of "finally and irreversibly" resolving the issue.

"This issue doesn't die with the survivors," Lee said. "If I can't take care of it, the problems will be passed to our next generation."

Agencies Via Xinhua