RIGHTS
International Justice needed for ''Comfort Women''
By Farhan Haq
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 25 (IPS) - The proposed International Criminal Court (ICC) should be allowed to deal with the issue of compensation for Asian 'comfort women' enslaved by Japanese soldiers during World War II, women's rights activists say.
The formation of the ICC is scheduled to be completed at a month-lomg meeting in Rome beginning June 15.
Its brief should include the hearing of a large range of gender-based crimes, from wartime rape to sexual slavery and assault, said Eleanor Conda, co- director of the Women's Caucus for Gender Justice in the ICC.
However, some specific atrocities - such as the enslavement in sexual servitude of some 200,000 Asian women by the Japanese Imperial Army - may be too much a part of the distant past to be tried by any world body, some jurists say. Women's rights activists, however, insist that the comfort women deserve their day in court.
''The violence that was seen in the issue of the comfort women was unprecedented in our history,'' argued Indai Sajor of the Asian Centre for Women's Humans Rights (ASCENT), a Philippines- based group.
Because of the large number of women whose rights were violated through their systematic conscription, abduction and rape, the surviving victims ''should be allowed to testify in court, and win reparations.''
As government delegates here continue their preparatory talks about the scope of the International Criminal Court, few observers expect any body which results to have the authority to try crimes retroactively.
For many legal experts, the prospect of Japan facing an ICC trial for war crimes charges dating back more than 50 years is remote at best.
Activists argue that the comfort women case is precisely the sort of atrocity the ICC should consider. ''Once a permanent international criminal court is created, there will be a forum for justice at hand... even for the comfort women,'' declared Samya Burney of Human Rights Watch's Women's Rights Project. ''The ICC is where we are all laying our hopes now.''
At the very least, Sajor contended, a hearing of the comfort women's testimony could help to restore their dignity and to strengthen the chances that modern-day cases of sexual slavery could be prosecuted. She cited reports that women had been conscripted to have sex with members of various fighting factions in the former Yugoslavia, Algeria, Kashmir and the border area between Burma and Thailand - where the Burmese government is fighting Karen insurgents - as examples of ongoing sexual slavery.
There are already U.N. tribunals based in the Hague to try war crimes, including gender-based atrocities, in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
However, Burney said, ''to date, the Rwanda tribunal has issued barely two indictments for rape and sexual violence.'' In the former Yugoslavia, 27 suspects have been indicted for gender-based violence, but only four of those suspects are in custody, she added. If any action is taken on the comfort women case, activists argue, it could provide a valuable touchstone for dealing with abductions of women into sexual servitude.
In a report last year to U.N. special rapporteur Radhika Coomaraswamy, ASCENT argued that the comfort women case was exceptional because ''historical records had proven that there was systematic conscription, recruitment, abduction and kidnapping of the women from the colonised countries'' to serve as sexual slaves of the invading Japanese troops.
''The establishment, staffing, operation and control of the comfort stations was part of the logistics of war,'' the report says. ''The enormity of this tragedy, its unprecedented nature, the vastness of its scale, as well as the sheer ruthlessness of those perpetrators and the ruined lives of the women, cannot be overstated.''
Sajor added that the nations from which the comfort women were seized - North and South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, China and Indonesia - have maintained their unity in seeking redress from Japan. Many of them continue to press the case, arguing that Japan has so far resisted making a full apology to the women and paying them reparations.
The Japanese government has argued that it already has paid compensation to war victims following the signing of the San Francisco Treaty in 1946. However, Sajor argued, comfort women were never mentioned nor compensated by the treaty. In recent years, the Japan-based Asian Women's Fund has tried to circumvent the need for an official action by the government by paying surviving victims roughly 15,000 dollars each as compensation.
Some of the comfort women in South Korea and the Philippines accepted the offer, but the majority rejected it. North Korea has refused to allow any acceptance of the Asian Women's Fund, while Taiwan has offered Taiwanese victims direct compensation while rebuffing the Fund's offer.
The central problem with the Fund is that is still does not give the comfort women a fair hearing of their case. ''These women have waited 50 years, much of it in obscurity'' so at least they can be heard now, Sajor argued. (END/IPS/fah/mk/98)