S. Korea names new envoy on Japan’s wartime sexual slavery

Kim Young-won

Korea has named a former ambassador to the Netherlands and an expert of international law to an envoy tasked with resolving a sensitive issue with Japan over aging Korean women forced into sexual slavery for Tokyo’s World War II soldiers, an official said Thursday.

Ambassador Kim Young-won, 60, replaced Choi Suk-inn, who moved on to become the ambassador to Azerbaijan as part of the foreign ministry’s regular reshuffle, the ministry official said.

“Given his extensive knowledge and experiences as a seasoned diplomat, we expect Kim to play a greater role in dealing with the issue,” the official said on the condition of anonymity.

Kim, who served as Seoul’s top diplomat to the Hague from 2008 to 2011, takes up the post at a time when Korea has pressed Japan to resolve the issue through apology and compensation for the Korean women on a humanitarian level.

But Tokyo has refused to do so, saying the matter was already settled by a 1965 treaty that normalized relations between the two countries.

Last August, Korea’s Constitutional Court ruled it unconstitutional for the Seoul government to make no specific effort to resolve the issue with Tokyo.

As the ruling marks its first anniversary later this month and Japan shows no sign of finding the heart to resolve the issue, Korea has been considering proposing that Japan set up a joint arbitration committee to deal with the matter, according to Seoul officials.

According to historians, up to 200,000 women, mostly Koreans, were coerced into sexual servitude at front-line Japanese military brothels during World War II when the Korean Peninsula was a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945. Those sex slaves were euphemistically called “comfort women.” (Yonhap News)