Jeju Forum 2017 Take UN report on sex slavery seriously: US historian

By Yi Whan-woo

Alexis Dudden

The international community should take seriously the latest U.N. report that recommends Korea and Japan revise their disputed deal on former Korean sex slaves, U.S. historian Alexis Dudden says.

Dudden, a history professor at the University of Connecticut, says the so-called “statues of peace,” aimed at symbolizing the victims, are “essential” for world history.

Dudden specializes in modern Korea and Japan and plans to talk about the importance of learning from history at the 12th Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity.

“This is not for Korea alone,” Dudden said in a recent written interview, referring to the U.N. Committee against Torture’s report released on May 12. “It is in everyone’s interest to take seriously the U.N. committee’s insistence that the survivors are at the heart of a deal that works.”

The committee recommended revising the deal on wartime sex slavery because it failed to consider the victims during the 1910-45 Japanese colonization of the Korean Peninsula.

Citing the “final and irreversible” agreement between the two sides in December 2015, Tokyo has been insisting that Seoul remove the “statues of peace” set up outside its diplomatic missions in Korea. The statues, also called “girl statues,” depict a stoic young Korean girl in commemoration of the victims.

“In this regard, the peace statues that create so much anxiety for the Shinzo Abe administration are essential to learning history — not simply for Koreans but throughout the world,” Dudden said.

She urged President Moon Jae-in to renegotiate the 2015 accord, saying it is “Moon’s job” for the deal to have any “lasting traction.”

Dudden also said the Japanese government’s claim that Korea should uphold the agreement “falls flat.”

“Norms throughout the international community center on victims and survivors: not perpetrators,” she said. “And even if there are signed documents from 2015 involving secret deals (like the notorious ‘Taft-Katsura Agreement’) ... this is not 1905. Today, as the country’s democratically elected representative, it is Moon’s job to renegotiate the deal.”

She highlighted the importance of understanding the difference between history and politics to avoid constantly confronting the past.

“When people outside the region learn about this history for the first time, they do not react by ‘hating’ Japan if they learn well; they learn from this specific history of militarized sexual slavery to work for the prevention of similar occurrences in the future,” she said.

“It seems to me that with the recent election of President Moon, Korea has the real potential to ‘de-weaponize’ the region’s so-called history wars and return history to its preferred place in society as a useful body of analytic knowledge that helps guide a better future.”