Women’s rights groups reiterate call for Japan to give justice to comfort women
Women’s rights groups reiterated their call to the Japanese government to give justice to comfort women and their opposition to the Philippine government’s security cooperation with Japan as they commemorated the 79th anniversary of the end of World War II in Manila on Wednesday.
Lila Pilipina and Gabriela held a rally at Roxas Boulevard, where a comfort woman statue was set up but later removed.
The rally was attended by May Ann Antillo, 53, the daughter of Paula Antillo, a comfort woman who died from Alzheimer’s Disease.
“We demand that the Japanese government finally give justice to Filipino comfort women. We demand the junking of the Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) between the Philippines and the Japanese governments. We do not want war,” Lila Pilipina Sharon Cabusao-Silva said during the rally.
In an ambush interview, Cabusao said justice was "long overdue".
"Many of the Lolas come from poor families or working-class families and they do not have really the basic necessities for the proper and adequate care of an elderly. So it is the tragedy that they experienced during World War II was something they never really got out of meaningfully,” she said.
She said two surviving comfort women could not attend because they were feeling unwell.
There are ten known surviving comfort women, with the oldest being 97 years old and the youngest 94 years old.
Cabusao said they held the rally “as a reiteration of our goal to give back the statue. That was stolen from our grandmothers, from our Lolas, in 2018, upon the pressure of the Japanese government”.
Cabusao said that they will also continue to ask Congress to push for the full implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) recommendation to create a reparation fund to compensate the comfort women.
“We actually already participated in a (Senate) committee hearing for the establishment of a technical working group to work on the recommendations,” she said.
“We're going to Congress within the next few weeks to resume our lobbying activities because this will be subjected to bicameral deliberations towards the latter part of the budget deliberations and we need to have an enacting law for the reparations fund,” she added.
Cabusao said the fund should be separate from the reparations that should be given by the Japanese government.
“The money has to come from the Japanese government itself. That is what we have been demanding, official reparations. Not from the Japanese private citizens, not from Japanese corporations, not from the Philippine government, but from the Japanese government,” she said.
“It should be preceded by a formal official apology from the Japanese government, not the private apology of the then Japanese prime ministers who did not carry the weight of official policy,” she added.
She also said the Philippine government was deceiving the public by declaring that it had compensated the comfort women when it was only using the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s (DSWD) existing social services program for the elderly.
“Some of the lolas have already availed of the social services program. So that's what I'm saying, that it's not a special program. but they used it to say that they have already assisted the Filipino comfort women and that is really a very a straight-out deception,” Cabusao said. Jaspearl Tan/DMS
