Deal With Japan on ‘comfort women’ failed victims: S.Korea

Seoul, Dec 28 (IANS) South Korean President Moon Jae-in said on Thursday that the wartime sexual slavery issue of "comfort women" cannot be resolved by a 2015 agreement with Japan after a government panel said it failed the victims.

Moon's comments came a day after Seoul's Foreign Ministry confirmed a secret deal in the 2015 agreement, Xinhua news agency reported.

The government in Seoul in 2015 under impeached President Park Geun-hye made the deal with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe over the South Korean victims, who were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese military brothels during World War II.

The South Korean government-appointed panel on Wednesday faulted the "final and irreversible" deal, giving Moon the potential opportunity to change or even scrap the agreement.

In the deal, Japan expressed responsibility and made a new apology promising a $8.3 million-compensation. In return, Seoul promised not to criticise Tokyo on the issue again, a New York Times report said.

After eight rounds of secretive high-level negotiations, when the pact was announced, parts of it were not made public, including Tokyo's demand that Seoul would not use the term "sexual slaves," the panel said.

Instead they would be referred to as "victims of comfort stations of the Japanese military," it said.

Seoul said on Thursday it would not take a final call without consulting the surviving victims and families of those who died.

Tokyo also warned that any attempt to revise the agreement would be "unacceptable" and affect relations.

The legacy of sexual slavery remains one of the most intractable disputes resulting from Japan's colonisation of Korea from 1910 to its World War II defeat in 1945.

Tens of thousands of women, many of them Korean, were lured or coerced to work in brothels catering to the Japanese Army from the early 1930s until 1945.

The Korean women who survived the war lived mostly in silence due to the stigma associated, and many never married.

A total of 238 women have come forward in South Korea since the early 1990s, of whom 36 are still alive.

Japan has maintained that all legal issues stemming from its colonial rule of Korea were resolved with a 1965 treaty.