Seasons in the Kingdom reference: ROKDROP

Women Forced Into Prostitution Sue the Korean Government for Human Rights Violations

Posted: 11 Jul 2014 07:20 AM PDT

I was wondering when this would eventually come to light:

Cho Myung-ja ran away from home as a teenager to escape a father who beat her, finding her way to the red light district in a South Korean town that hosts a large U.S. Army garrison.

After she escaped home in the early 1960s, her pimp sold her to one of the brothels allowed by the government to serve American soldiers.

“It was a hard life and we got sick,” Cho, 76, said in an interview in her cluttered room in a shack outside Camp Humphreys, a busy U.S. military garrison in the town of Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul.

On June 25, sixty-four years after the Korean War broke out, Cho joined 122 surviving comfort women, as they were called, in a lawsuit against their government to reclaim, they say, human dignity and proper compensation.

The suit comes as an embarrassing distraction for the South Korean government, which has pushed Japan to properly atone for what it says were World War Two atrocities including forcing women, many of them Korean, to serve as sex slaves for its soldiers.  [Reuters]

It is pretty well known that many Korean girls were sold often times by their parents into the Korean club system many decades ago to service not only US GIs, but Korean as well.  To learn more about this time period I recommend reading the book “Seasons in the Kingdom” about the GI experience in 1960′s Korea.  Likewise when it comes to human trafficking many of the women from the Philippines when they first came over to Korea I think in 1998 to work in the clubs were kept locked up in buildings that had barb wire on the roofs to prevent them from escaping.  I wonder if some of these Filipinas can launch a lawsuit as well for having their human rights violated?
The complaints against the Japanese for something that happened over 60 years ago seems a bit two faced when the Korean government has done nothing to address the victims of the comfort women system in South Korea that the government help to implement.