South Korea will not seek to renegotiate a deal with Japan on wartime sex slavery, it said yesterday, despite South Korean President Moon Jae-in saying on the campaign trail that he “could not accept” the agreement.
Ousted South Korean president Park Guen-hye sought to end the decades-long row with a 2015 agreement that included a Japanese apology and payment of ￥1 billion (US$8.9 million) to survivors.
However, under the deal, Japan did not admit legal responsibility for the abuses, drawing anger from some survivors who refused to take the money.
Ties between the two neighbors remain tense over statues placed outside Japanese diplomatic missions by South Korean activists in memory of the victims.
Last month, Moon slammed the agreement as “seriously flawed” and told officials to re-examine it, but now South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs Kang Kyung-wha has said it was an “undeniable fact” that both governments had formally endorsed it.
“Considering that, our government will not demand renegotiation of the deal to the Japanese government,” Kang told reporters yesterday.
However, Seoul would not use any more of Tokyo’s money for the survivors, replacing the funds from its own budget, Kang said, urging Tokyo to offer a “voluntary and sincere apology.”
The financial move seeks to take the moral high ground and avoid perceptions that Tokyo has settled the issue by way of reparations.
Japan has urged South Korea to stick with the 2015 deal, saying any attempt by Seoul to revise it “cannot be acceptable whatsoever” and would leave bilateral ties “unmanageable.”
It is the second time Moon’s government has avoided implementing a campaign promise made to appeal to his base on practical grounds — a pledge to phase out nuclear power was outsourced to a citizen jury, which decided that the nation needed atomic energy.
Mainstream historians say that up to 200,000 women — mostly from Korea, but also other parts of Asia, including Taiwan and China — were forced to become sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during the war.
The Japanese government denies it is directly responsible, saying that “comfort women” were recruited by civilians and that the army brothels were commercially operated.
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
OUTRAGE: The former strongman was accused of corruption and responsibility for the killings of hundreds of thousands of political opponents during his time in office Indonesia yesterday awarded the title of national hero to late president Suharto, provoking outrage from rights groups who said the move was an attempt to whitewash decades of human rights abuses and corruption that took place during his 32 years in power. Suharto was a US ally during the Cold War who presided over decades of authoritarian rule, during which up to 1 million political opponents were killed, until he was toppled by protests in 1998. He was one of 10 people recognized by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in a televised ceremony held at the presidential palace in Jakarta to mark National
US President Donald Trump handed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban a one-year exemption from sanctions for buying Russian oil and gas after the close right-wing allies held a chummy White House meeting on Friday. Trump slapped sanctions on Moscow’s two largest oil companies last month after losing patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin over his refusal to end the nearly four-year-old invasion of Ukraine. However, while Trump has pushed other European countries to stop buying oil that he says funds Moscow’s war machine, Orban used his first trip to the White House since Trump’s return to power to push for
LANDMARK: After first meeting Trump in Riyadh in May, al-Sharaa’s visit to the White House today would be the first by a Syrian leader since the country’s independence Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa arrived in the US on Saturday for a landmark official visit, his country’s state news agency SANA reported, a day after Washington removed him from a terrorism blacklist. Sharaa, whose rebel forces ousted long-time former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad late last year, is due to meet US President Donald Trump at the White House today. It is the first such visit by a Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946, according to analysts. The interim leader met Trump for the first time in Riyadh during the US president’s regional tour in May. US envoy to Syria Tom Barrack earlier
RSS