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Korea's new 'comfort
women'
By Gustavo Capdevila
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".
(Inter Press Service)
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