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Korea's new 'comfort women'
By Gustavo Capdevila
September 5, 2002
Geneva - In an effort to keep US soldiers happy, more than 5,000 women, mostly
from the Philippines and Russia, are used as "comfort women" in a prostitution
network in South Korea, a United Nations agency reported on Tuesday.
"The plight of trafficked women in South Korea is quite serious," said the
International Organization for Migration (IOM) in a study released on Tuesday
at its headquarters in Geneva.
The first concerns about the trafficking of women emerged in South Korea in the
mid-1990s, when reports began to circulate that there were many foreign women,
particularly from the Philippines, working in the bars near the US military
bases. The reports called to mind Japan's use of "comfort women", mostly
Koreans, for its soldiers' entertainment from 1910-45.
The bars located near the US military bases are the leading employers of
Filipinas, whom the traffickers apparently prefer for their English-speaking
skills, and who are admitted into South Korea with E-6 visas, also known as
entertainment visas.
According to the IOM report, these "foreign entertainers" are brought to South
Korea because they are considered "essential to the survival of the military
camp town businesses, which have been suffering from a declining supply of
South Korean women".
In 1999, there were an estimated 1,000 Filipinas working in the US military
base areas, according to the Overseas Workers Administration of the Philippine
government. The women were young, some under age 20, and the majority came from
the central Philippine region of Luzon, and the Pinatubo area in particular.
The report's author, June Lee, former chief of the IOM mission in Seoul, said
the most conservative estimates indicate that hundreds of women arrive in South
Korea each month, brought by human traffickers to be used in the local sex
industry.
"Those who bring these women to South Korea appear to have a good working
knowledge of the immigration regulations of all the countries involved," she
noted.
Lee said it is the responsibility of the government's criminal investigators to
determine whether major crime rings are behind this phenomenon.
However, the report found that a South Korean organization is the chief
contractor for holders of the E-6 visa. The organization, the Korea Special
Tourism Association, is "approved and regulated by the Ministry of Culture and
Tourism", according to the document.
The association consists of 189 owners of clubs that operate near the various
US military camps throughout South Korea.
Given these facts, "clearly there is some linkage" between the trafficking of
women and the presence of US troops, said Christopher Lom, spokesman for the
IOM, which is dedicated to ensuring the rights of migrants and working with
governments to develop humane responses to the challenges posed by human
migration.
After Japan's defeat in World War II in 1945, South Korea was liberated from
Japanese domination, but was occupied by US forces until 1948. Washington sent
forces again in 1950 for the Korean War, and they have maintained a presence
ever since.
The IOM report states that some observers have suggested that there was an
unwritten or "de facto" policy of the US military to "keep the men happy" with
the presence of women near the bases.
The foreign women working in the sex industry in South Korea "have been
predominantly from the Philippines and Russia", says Lee's study. But there are
also women coming from Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Indonesia, "though in very small
numbers", and rarely, there are women trafficked from Latin American countries,
such as Peru.
The Filipinas and Russian women alike are well educated, and some -
particularly the Russians - are university graduates, says the IOM report.
The IOM urges the South Korean government to reach official consensus "on
Korean terminology to describe the trafficking of women into situations where
they are exploited as prostitutes or placed in low-paying jobs by abusive
employers".
It also cites a report released by the US Department of State in July 2001,
which criticizes Seoul for its failure to take decisive action "to combat this
relatively new and worsening problem of trafficking in persons".
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