A new location has been set for the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum, with efforts launched to raise money for a construction fund.

At a press conference Thursday morning at the new museum site in the Seongsan neighborhood of Seoul’s Mapo District, the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Korean Council) announced that it was beginning work on building the museum. Discussions on building the museum began in 2003 as women who had been drafted as “comfort women” in the past entered their eighties and began to pass away one by one. The women had been coerced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese military during World War II. The starting point was an appeal by former comfort women asking to “help create a world without any more war or violence as people see and learn from the truth about us.”

The women each donated one to two million won ($951 to $1,901) from the livelihood subsidies they received from the government, and a total of 1.7 billion won has been raised to date through contributions from supporters. In 2006, the city of Seoul granted permission to build the museum on the site of a store building in Seodaemun Independence Park, with final project approval granted in 2008.

But the construction ran into a hurdle in November 2008 when the Association for Surviving Family Members of Martyrs for the Country and Korea Liberation Association announced their opposition. The argument was that it would defame patriotic martyrs to have the comfort women’s museum built within Independence Park where they are enshrined, and that it might instill the “distorted historical perception of a race that merely experienced suffering at the hands of the Japanese empire.”

The city continued to put off its approval for the store building demolition, during which time 11 former comfort women died. Finally, the Korean Council decided to search throughout central Seoul to locate a site and hasten the building process, before finally selecting the Seongsan site at the foot of Mt. Seongmi.

Korean Council Secretary General Yun Mi-hyang said plans were under way to open the museum on December 10, Universal Declaration of Human Rights Day.

“Beyond its exhibition and education functions, the museum will be a setting for a collective campaign to resolve the issues of comfort women in Japan and wartime sexual violence,” Yun added.

The museum’s construction committee said it would require 900 million won for future remodeling and operating expenses.

“We plan to raise the money through the collective efforts of the ten thousand construction committee members,” it said. (Web site: www.womenandwar.net)

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]