US lawyer raises global awareness of ‘comfort women’

SAN FRANCISCO — If Japan continues to deny its involvement in war rape and to refuse to compensate World War II “comfort women,” it isn’t any different from the Islamic State (IS), according to a renowned human rights lawyer.

“By not owning up, Japan is portraying itself in the same light as the IS,” lawyer Karen Parker said during an interview with The Korea Times at her home in San Francisco on Aug. 18. “When a country like Japan gets away with something like this, it encourages other groups. Groups like the IS are going to say, ‘We are small potatoes. We can do this.'”

The late Kim Hak-sun was the first comfort woman victim in Korea to speak publicly about her suffering during World War II. / Yonhap

War rape is still prevalent in a number of countries where armed conflicts are ongoing.

According to a United Nations report released in April, the IS and several other armed groups use rape and other types of sexual violence against women to terrorize people and fund their wars in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere through sex trafficking or kidnapping for ransom.

Nearly 1,500 people have been victimized in Iraq in the months before the release of the U.N. report. It said an increasing number of women in Syria are captured and raped by the extremist group’s fighters. The IS is one of the 13 armed groups that were added to the U.N. list of groups that used sexual slavery of women.

Parker, a specialist on armed conflict law and wartime sex slavery, said an unapologetic Japan sends the wrong message to those vicious armed groups that abuse women as a war tactic.

“It is not going to stop until Japan says we stop it. No one has apologized for sex slavery nor compensated its victims, so in a sense, it is still going on,” the lawyer said. “Japan is in the same situation as the IS.” People understand that sex slavery helps brutalize soldiers, prompting them to also fight brutally, according to her. “Japan brutalized its soldiers (during World War II), and it’s a dishonor,” she said.

Parker is credited as one of the early international advocates of comfort women who put pressure on Japan to come up with necessary remedies for its enslavement of Asian women during World War II.

Mindy Kotler, director of Asia Policy Point in Washington D.C., said Parker was “one of the women who got the ball rolling.” “She established the legal arguments supporting the comfort women and by doing so moved the issue beyond a mere regional war crime to its universality,” the activist said.

Parker became an influential voice on the issue following her famous speech during the 51st session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 1996.

This register of the sixth grade class of Pangsan Primary School in Seoul shows that the Japanese government was involved in the mobilization of 12-year-old school girls to provide sexual services for Japanese soldiers during World War II. / Korea Times

“Mr. Chairman, how much compensation do you think ought to be paid to a woman who was raped 7,500 times?” she asked the chairman of the U.N. body during the session in Geneva. “What would the members of the Commission want for their daughters if their daughters had been raped even once? China, Korea, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Burma, these are your daughters.”

Parker attended the session as a credentialed nongovernmental representative. Since 1982, under that capacity, the human rights lawyer has addressed a variety of armed conflict violations in a number of countries to get the U.N. to respond to her requests.

“Japan, your surviving victims are elderly, many if not most suffering from health consequences from your rapes. Do the right thing. Pay them,” she urged.

Her speech convinced the floor partly because she presented detailed figures to signify the magnitude of the comfort women and the abuses they experienced from Japan.

This post card was drawn by a sex slavery victim and sold during a fundraising event years ago to help the victims. / Korea Times file

Parker said as many as 200,000 women were taken to comfort stations all over the Asia-Pacific region, and each of those women was raped at least five times per day. This means that there were at least 100,000 rapes per day arranged by the Japanese authorities and carried out by their soldiers, she went on to say.

“The victims were not volunteers, so I thought the U.N. members had to see it in personal terms. So I presented it that way,” Parker recalled. “A number of countries were completely shocked because they had no idea that had happened.”

Parker said she became involved with the issue when, before the 1996 U.N. session, several Korean activists asked for her help in raising the issue at the U.N.

Her statement changed the perception of comfort women and turned sex slavery into a global issue. Before Parker’s statement, the U.N. was rather indifferent toward the issue, probably because it was relatively unknown in the international community at the time.

In Korea, Japan’s wartime sex slavery was first addressed during a conference in the late 1980s by a group of scholars, including former Ewha Women’s University Professor Yoon Chung-ok.

The late Kim Hak-sun, a comfort woman, broke her silence on Aug. 14, 1991, a day before the 46th anniversary of the end of World War II. During a news conference in Seoul, Kim testified about how she was taken by the Japanese military when she was merely 16 years old and how hard it was for her to speak about her ordeals in public. She was the first Korean victim who spoke openly about her suffering during World War II.

Parker’s groundbreaking statement prompted plenty of responses from the members of the U.N. human rights body and was summarized in U.N. documents.

There were a number of preliminary requests from the committees handling human rights violations and violence against women, and several reports on the issue were produced. Of those reports, Parker said the report by the U.N. Commission on Violence Against Women was a major one because it presented undisputable facts, which were damning for Japan.

Surviving victims were invited to Geneva in several conferences to testify about what they had gone through during World War II to a public audience. They testified behind a screen and were not on stage because they were ashamed to appear in public.

Nearly two decades since her statement in Geneva, Japan has yet to apologize for its crimes and to compensate its victims.

Parker said compensating the war rape victims is a tough decision for Japan to make because doing so would have a spillover effect on other issues. If Japan decides to compensate them, she said, it would encourage other war crime victims, such as prisoners of war in the United States and Canada, for example, to pressure Japan to compensate them, too.

“For Japan to do the proper thing with the war rape victims would put enormous pressure for it to do the proper thing with other victims, too, because the numbers of victims are big,” she said. “Japan has not paid any of its World War II victims, with very few exceptions. Prisoners of war in Japan have not been adequately compensated. It took time for Japan to concede to anything.”

According to Parker, military commanders who ordered war rapes have suffered lifelong psychological damage.

“Sometimes, the one who ordered it had a worse experience than the one who carried out,” she said, referring to an unnamed U.S. military general, who ordered violations in Vietnam and whom she met years ago during an event to commemorate the Vietnam War.

Regardless, Parker maintained that Japan has to compensate the victims.

“I think there is a lot of delay tactics. But the issue is not going to go away. All of the victims’ families are still here,” she said. “One of the issues that Germany understood was that the children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews and other family members of its victims are still there. To the degree that the main victim wasn’t compensated, Germany compensated down the family line. So it’s not going to go away for Japan.”

She underlined that there is no statutory limit on war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“I think that may be an avenue for the Korean government to explore having discussions with Japan,” she said.

Parker advised that Korea and Japan have “real talks” to resolve the decades-long issue to move their bilateral relations forward.