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| President Park Geun-hye speaks about North Korea at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts in central Seoul, Tuesday, during a ceremony marking the 97th anniversary of the March 1 Independence Movement. / Yonhap |
President urges Japan to fulfill sex slavery agreement
By Kang Seung-woo
President Park Geun-hye said Tuesday that South Korea and the international community will continue to put greater pressure on North Korea unless it abandons its nuclear weapons program.
"As long as the North does not show its commitment to denuclearization and refuses to change, we and the international community will continue to put pressure on the country," stated Park during a speech marking the 97th anniversary of the March 1 Independence Movement.
She said her administration will aim to make North Korea have no choice but to abandon its nuclear program.
"Now, the ball is in the North's court," she said.
Park said that the North has concentrated all its efforts on developing nuclear weapons, but that this pursuit cannot help to maintain its regime and is, ultimately, meaningless.
"Unless we keep the North, which repeats reckless provocations, in check, it will continue to carry out a fifth and sixth nuclear test, which will threaten stability in Northeast Asia and world peace."
To punish the Kim Jong-un regime for its Jan. 6 nuclear test and Feb. 7 long-range rocket launch, the United Nations Security Council issued a draft resolution last week that will impose the harshest sanctions yet on the North, which is scheduled to be put to a vote at 5:00 a.m., Wednesday (KST).
Following the North's string of military provocations, the Park government has adopted a hard-line stance on the repressive state, apparently departing from her administration's trust-building process on the Korean Peninsula, based on inter-Korean dialogue.
However, the President raised the need for peaceful unification between the two Koreas in order to stop the North's nuclear development and defuse tensions on the peninsula.
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Comfort women
Regarding Japan, President Park urged the Japanese government to fully implement the "comfort women" verbal agreement, reached on Dec. 28 to end their dispute over Tokyo's enslavement of Korean women forced into sexual slavery at Japanese wartime "comfort stations" during World War II.
Under the deal, Japan formally apologized for its past actions, admitted responsibility for them, and offered 1 billion yen ($8.29 million) in reparations. South Korea agreed to end the dispute once and for all if Japan fully implements the deal.
However, since December, a number of officials in the Japanese government, including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, have made remarks denying that the neighboring nation's imperial military forced Korean women into sexual slavery.
Park vowed to make utmost efforts to help the victims restore their honor and heal their psychological scars. She also promised to expand substantial assistance to the victims, though she did not elaborate on how this will occur.
In addition, the President pledged to successfully carry out her three-year plan for economic innovation and reforms in the labor, finance, public and education sectors in order to establish a solid foundation for the nation's economy.
She especially stressed the need to reform the labor market.
"It is a reform to create jobs for young people. I ask those in the labor, management and political sectors to support it," Park said.
The jobless rate among people between the ages of 15 and 29 reached a record high of 9.2 percent in 2015, the highest since 1999 and much higher than the 3.6 percent average for the country as a whole.
A bill to reform the labor market is still pending at the National Assembly due to objections from the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea who says that its content could cause additional disadvantages for irregular workers.
She also slammed the National Assembly for neglecting its duty regarding an anti-terrorism bill amid growing threats of terrorist attacks.
The bill is aimed at better protecting the nation from possible attacks, but has been gathering dust in parliament for 15 years because the opposition is concerned about more authority being granted to the National Intelligence Service.
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