More than 100 South Korean women forced to work as prostitutes for US soldiers stationed in the country have filed a landmark lawsuit accusing Washington of abuse, their lawyers said Tuesday.

Historians and activists say tens of thousands of South Korean women worked for state-sanctioned brothels from the 1950s to 1980s, serving US troops stationed in country to protect the South from North Korea.

In 2022, South Korea's top court ruled that the government had illegally "established, managed and operated" such brothels for the US military, ordering it to pay around 120 plaintiffs compensation.

Last week, 117 victims filed a fresh lawsuit, this time officially accusing -- and seeking an apology from -- the US military, for the first time.

The lawsuit seeks 10 million won ($7,200) in compensation per victim.

Unlike the better-known "comfort women" used by Japanese soldiers until the end of World War II, those who worked for the US troops have received relatively limited attention, largely due to Washington being Seoul's key and longtime security ally.

The economy surrounding military brothels in US base towns, including restaurants, barbershops and bars catering to American GIs, made up about 25 percent of South Korea's GDP during the 1960s and 70s, according to historians.

"I still cannot forget being beaten by US soldiers -- slapped for lowering my head while pouring drinks, for not smiling, or for no reason at all," one of the plaintiffs, in her 60s and who did not wish to give her name, said in a statement sent to AFP.

She said she was only 17 when she was tricked into the job -- she thought she was going to be a bartender, but was forced into sex work and told she could not leave due to her "debt".

'I couldn't walk'

"Every night we were dragged to US soldiers and sexually abused. Every week we were forced to undergo venereal disease tests. If there was the slightest abnormality, we were locked in a small room and injected with a thick needle of strong penicillin," she said.

"The shots were so harsh that my legs gave out and I couldn't even walk."

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In a joint statement, women's rights activists supporting the victims said the US military "ignored the South Korean Constitution" and stripped the women of their personal freedom and "destroyed their lives".

The suit names the South Korean government as the defendant, since under existing laws Seoul must compensate victims of illegal acts committed by US soldiers on duty and later seek reimbursement from Washington, lawyers said.

"This lawsuit seeks to hold both the South Korean government and the US military authorities jointly liable for the unlawful acts," lawyer Ha Ju-hee told AFP.

The US still stations around 28,500 troops in South Korea to help protect it against nuclear-armed North Korea.

The United States Forces Korea (USFK) told AFP it was "aware of the reports regarding the issue", adding "we will not comment while legal proceedings are ongoing".

"We affirm that we do not condone any behavior that violates Republic of Korea laws, rules, or directives, and we remain committed to maintaining the highest standards of good order and discipline." the USFK said.

cdl/ceb/

Dozens of South Korean women forced into sex work for American soldiers stationed in the country have filed a historic lawsuit accusing the U.S. military of playing a systematic role in their abuse.

Known as the “Camptown women”, they claim they were subjected to human rights abuses, forced into regular STD testing, held in isolation, and sometimes subjected to violent treatment at these state-sanctioned brothels.

The lawsuit, filed by more than 100 women, according to AFP, demands a formal apology and financial compensation, while aiming to hold the U.S. military accountable for its role in this state-sponsored system, which local officials and the military allegedly treated as a way to support the economy and protect troops from disease.

The case follows a 2022 ruling in which South Korea’s Supreme Court ordered the government to compensate the women for encouraging prostitution for U.S. military soldiers. The ruling held the government responsible for “justifying and encouraging” prostitution in camp towns to sustain South Korea’s military alliance with the U.S. and attract American dollars.

During the Korean War, there were “special comfort women units” for South Korean soldiers and “comfort stations” for American-led UN forces. After the war, many of these women reportedly worked in gijichon, or “camp towns”, established around American military bases.

At a news conference on Monday, a 66-year-old woman shared her harrowing experience, revealing that she was only 16 when she was trafficked to a pimp who served American soldiers.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, she accused the U.S. military of being fully aware of minors who were exploited but turning a blind eye to the abuse.

She also said that there was a lack of societal support for women in her situation.

The lawsuit demands 10m won (or $7,200) in compensation for each victim.

Unlike the sympathy widely extended to women forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers during World War II, these women have been left to suffer in silence, the lawsuit says.

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They described living under a cloud of shame, marginalised by a society that viewed them as a hidden, uncomfortable consequence of the U.S.-South Korea alliance.

According to the women’s testimonies, those who tested positive for sexually transmitted diseases were confined in facilities with barred windows, where they were administered high doses of penicillin. Some died from penicillin shock, the lawsuit alleges.

Their lawyers argued that the U.S. military insisted on their isolation, while local authorities complied, supported by declassified documents presented in court.

The system operated until at least 2004, the lawyer for the women claimed, despite prostitution being illegal in South Korea.

“I still cannot forget being beaten by U.S. soldiers – slapped for lowering my head while pouring drinks, for not smiling, or for no reason at all,” one of the plaintiffs, in her 60s said in a statement shared with AFP. She didn’t want to be named.

She said she was only 17 when she was tricked into the job.

“Every night we were dragged to U.S. soldiers and sexually abused. Every week, we were forced to undergo venereal disease tests. If there was the slightest abnormality, we were locked in a small room and injected with a thick needle of strong penicillin,” she said.

The United States Forces Korea (USFK) told AFP it was "aware of the reports regarding the issue", adding "we will not comment while legal proceedings are ongoing".

"We affirm that we do not condone any behaviour that violates Republic of Korea laws, rules, or directives, and we remain committed to maintaining the highest standards of good order and discipline," the USFK said.

At the time, a local South Korean newspaper described these women as an “illegal, cancer-like, necessary evil”, while also noting that they were “also frontline warriors in winning dollars”.

For decades, the plight of women working in camp towns near U.S. military bases remained largely ignored by the public and authorities in South Korea. Public awareness of sexual exploitation in South Korea’s camp towns grew after the brutal 1992 murder of a woman named Yun Geum-i by an American soldier.

Between 1960 and 2004, at least 11 sex workers were killed by U.S. troops, according to the advocacy group Saewoomtuh.

Meanwhile, in a joint statement, women’s rights activists advocating for the victims accused the U.S. military of having “ignored the South Korean Constitution”, depriving the women of their personal freedom and “destroying their lives”.

“This lawsuit seeks to hold both the South Korean government and the U.S. military authorities jointly liable for the unlawful acts,” lawyer Ha Ju-hee said.

The Independent has reached out to the USFK for a comment.

A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.

Having rebranded the Department of Defense as the Department of War, the president is going on offense with the US military.

Donald Trump has foisted National Guard troops on Washington, DC, and Los Angeles. Other cities are on edge, particularly after he posted an apparently artificially generated image of himself dressed up like Robert Duvall’s surfing cavalry commander in “Apocalypse Now,” a meme that seemed to suggest he was threatening war on the city of Chicago.

Trump later clarified that the US would not go to war on Chicago, but he’s clearly comfortable joking about it. And he’s of the opinion his authority over the military is absolute.

“Not that I don’t have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States,” he said at a Cabinet meeting in August, when he was asked about the prospect of Chicagoans engaging in nonviolent resistance against the US military.

He’s reorienting the US military to focus on drug traffickers as terrorists and told Congress to expect more military strikes after the US destroyed a boat in the Caribbean last week.

All of this projects the kind of strongman decisiveness Trump admires.

A lot of it might also be illegal.

A ‘violation of the Posse Comitatus Act’

US District Judge Charles Breyer ruled this month that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth committed a “a serious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act” when they deployed federalized troops to Los Angeles over the objections of the state’s governor and mayor.

The Posse Comitatus Act was passed by Congress in 1878 as Southern states worked to oust federal troops and end Reconstruction. Questions over how and whether troops can be used to enforce laws goes back to the pre-Civil War period, when federal marshals sought help from citizens and militiamen in recovering fugitive slaves and putting down the protests of abolitionists, according to the Congressional Research Service.

It is not clear why Trump has not yet, as he has promised, called up the National Guard to patrol in Chicago, but he may be waiting for the Supreme Court, which has been extremely deferential to his claims of authority, to weigh in on a preliminary basis.

Trump has more authority to deploy the military inside Washington, DC, which the Constitution says Congress controls. But Congress has ceded some authority to locally elected officials in recent decades. DC’s Attorney General Brian Schwalb has sued the Trump administration over the deployment.

Testing the War Powers Act

Trump’s strike on a boat in the Caribbean is also on murky legal ground.

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After Vietnam, Congress overrode Richard Nixon’s veto to pass another law, the War Powers Act of 1973, which requires presidents to notify Congress within 48 hours of a military strike. And Trump did do that, at least his third such notification since taking office in January. Trump also sent notifications to Congress about his strike against an Iranian nuclear facility and Houthi rebels who were attacking shipping routes.

The Reiss Center at New York University maintains a database of War Powers Act notifications going back to the 1970s.

Cartels as terrorist organizations

In the notification about the Caribbean strike, Trump’s administration argued that it has declared drug cartels are terrorist organizations and that he operated within his constitutional authority to protect the country when he ordered the strike.

Strikes against terrorists have been authorized under the catchall vote that authorized the use of military force against Islamic terrorists after the 9/11 terror attacks.

But Congress, which the Constitution puts in charge of declaring war, has not authorized the use of military force against Venezuelan drug cartels.

Lack of explanation from the White House

Over the weekend, CNN’s Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand and Zachary Cohen reported that the Pentagon abruptly canceled classified briefings to key House and Senate committees with oversight of the military, which means lawmaker have been unable to get the legal justification for the strike.

Many Americans might celebrate the idea of a military strike to take out drug dealers, and the administration is clearly primed to lean on the idea that the cartels are terrorists.

Here’s a key quote from CNN’s report:

“The strike was the obvious result of designating them a terrorist organization,” said one person familiar with the Pentagon’s thinking. “If there was a boat full of al Qaeda fighters smuggling explosives towards the US, would anyone even ask this question?”

Few details

It’s not yet clear which military unit was responsible for the strike, what intelligence suggested there were drugs onboard, who was on the boat or what the boat was carrying.

“The attack on the smuggling vessel in the Caribbean was so extraordinary because there was no reported attempt to stop the boat or detain its crew,” wrote Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal advisor now at International Crisis Group for the website Just Security. “Instead, the use of lethal force was used in the first resort.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US could have interdicted the boat and made a legal case against those onboard, but it decided instead to blow up the boat. The notice to Congress makes clear the administration will continue with other strikes.

War crime? Vance doesn’t ‘give a sh*t’

“The decision to blow up the boat and kill everyone onboard when interdiction and detention was a clearly available option is manifestly illegal and immoral,” Oona Hathaway, a law professor and director of the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School, told me in an email.

The view of the administration could be best summarized by Vice President JD Vance stating that using the military to go after cartels is “the highest and best use of our military.”

When a user on X replied that the extrajudicial killing of civilians without presenting evidence is, by definition, a war crime, Vance, himself a Yale-educated lawyer, said this:

“I don’t give a sh*t what you call it.”

That’s not an acceptable response even for some Republicans.

“Did he ever read To Kill a Mockingbird?” wrote Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky in his own post on X. “Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation?? What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial.”

Congress has power it likely won’t use

Congress has the power to stop Trump’s campaign against boats in the Caribbean. The War Powers Act allows lawmakers in the House and Senate to demand the president seek approval before continuing a campaign longer than 60 days. But that seems unlikely to occur at the moment.

After the strike against Iran earlier this year, Paul was the only Republican senator to side with Democrats and demand Trump seek approval for any future Iran strikes.

During his first term, seven Republicans voted with Senate Democrats to hem in Trump’s ability to strike against Iran after he ordered the killing of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani. But there were not enough votes to overcome Trump’s veto that year.

Trump’s authority to use military force without congressional approval of the Caribbean operation technically expires after 60 days after he reports on the use of force, although he can extend it by an additional 30 days, although he could also declare a new operation is underway.

The use of these kinds of tactics has likely been in the works for some time.

In February, Trump designated drug cartels, including Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, as foreign terror organizations. In April, CNN reported the CIA was reviewing whether it had authority to use lethal force against drug cartels.

But the military strike against the alleged cartel boat happened as part of a broader campaign against Venezuela, including positioning US ships, aircraft and a submarine in the Caribbean, according to a CNN report.

Trump may have campaigned as a president who would end wars, but he’s governing like a president who is very comfortable using his military.

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