By ANTHONY IAN CRUZ
Malaya
Nov. 7, 2007
THREE comfort women, including a Filipina, are now on a campaign tour across Europe to convince the continent’s leaders to raise the issue of World War II sexual slavery with Japan during a European Union-East Asia summit on Nov. 21.
Menen Castillo, now 78, was turned into a sex slave by invading Japanese troops in 1942 when she was only 13. Today, she heads Lolas Kampanyera and joins two other so-called comfort women from Indonesia and South Korea in the quest to obtain Japan’s official admission, apology, and reparations to the countless women its soldiers raped and brutalized in the countries they occupied during World War II.
Castillo, Gil Won Ok of South Korea and Ellen van der Ploeg of Indonesia will testify today before the European Parliament in Brussels in a hearing to be chaired by MEP Jean Lambert.
Department of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Claro Cristobal did not reply to queries whether the DFA or the Philippine Embassy in Brussels is assisting Castillo in any way.
The campaign tour began last week in The Hague with protest actions in front of the Dutch Parliament and the Japanese Embassy.
Next stops will be the European capitals of Berlin and London, according to Amnesty International which spearheaded the tour as part of two campaigns dubbed Stop Violence Against Women, and Justice for Survivors of Japan’s Sexual Slavery System.
As late as March this year, Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe maintained that Japanese military authorities had no hand in the rapes, and that economic issues compelled the Asian women to become prostitutes.
AI said historians have concluded that as many as 200,000 women were enslaved from the 1930s through the duration of World War II as “comfort women” for the Imperial Armed Forces.
Last July 31, the US House of Representatives approved Resolution 121 expressing its sentiment that Japan “should formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Forces’ coercion of young women into sexual slavery, known to the world as comfort women,” during World War II.
The Philippine Lower House followed suit with Resolution 124 now pending in the chamber’s foreign affairs committee.