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The war not over yet for sex slaves
( 2001-06-20 00:12 ) (9 )

For years, Su Zhiliang and his Shanghai-based Chinese Sex Slave Research Centre has been working hard to help the nation's surviving comfort women in combating a war that ended long ago but is not truly over.

To most of these women, now in their 70s or older, life has been a tedious battle -- first against the Japanese soldiers and then fighting shame and discrimination.

"Most of the surviving comfort women are leading a difficult life, plagued with sickness and without children to support them,'' said Su.

According to Su, during China's War of Resistance against Japan between 1937 and 1945, at least 200,000 Chinese women were forced to provide sex services for Japanese soldiers. Most of these comfort women died or were killed during the war. Only about 60 of them, scattered across China, are still alive today.

"Their experience as comfort women has completely changed the course of their lives,'' said Su. "Instead of going to school and getting married, they had to marry men far away from their hometowns. Some fell victims to domestic violence because they were unable to give birth to children.''

According to Su, nearly every comfort woman has suffered from gynaecological diseases. In addition, the experience has left them with serious psychological traumas.

Seventy-nine-year-old Yuan Zhulin, who was a comfort woman between the ages of 17 and 23, said that the experience has left her with serious insomnia and chronic headaches.

"My life has been destroyed by the Japanese,'' said Yuan. "The wound in my heart will never heal.''

"Some of the former comfort women often have nightmares,'' Su said. "To them, the war is not yet over.''

Despite the obvious atrocity, the issue of comfort women has only recently been of widespread public concern.

"The inside story of the comfort women was little known to the public because the Japanese Government had been covering it up, and the victims usually did not want to recall such a nightmarish experience again,'' said Fang Yuzhu, with the All-China Women's Federation.

In recent years, Chinese comfort women, like those in other East Asian countries, have had to resort to laws to demand compensation for their suffering of more than half a century ago. However, so far, none of them has won their cases.

Su said he was quite pessimistic about the possible results of the court decisions, considering the growing tendency to conservatism in Japan.

"As a result of the wrong historical view, many Japanese youth do not know about this part of history about comfort women,'' said Su.

Apart from providing financial support to the victims and doing further research on history of the incidents, Su and his colleagues have turned to the use of notarized accounts to record the Japanese atrocity. They hope that by using this method, even after all the comfort women have died, there will still be evidence.

"The 60 remaining comfort women represent an era and a part of history,'' said Su.