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 decades-long impasse over sexual slavery by seeking judgement 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 -- who sent a petition to UN human rights investigators last week to press Seoul and Tokyo to jointly refer the issue to 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 swears 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 moment in global affairs.It is hard for Lee to be patient when other survivors keep dying. She worries about their plight being forgotten or distorted by Japan's apparent efforts to downplay the coercive and violent nature of the World War II sexual slavery and exclude it from schoolbooks.
She cried as she described how she was dragged from home as a 16-year-old to serve as a sex slave for Japan's Imperial Army, and the harsh abuse she endured at a Japanese military brothel in Taiwan until the end of the war.