Page:Larry Niksch - Japanese Military's Comfort Women System - CRS April 3, 2007.pdf/23

 An overlooked issue in much of the discussion of comfort women is whether former comfort women in allied and occupied countries had adequate freedom to decide whether to accept compensation and/or assistance from the Asian Women’s Fund. It appears that they did have sufficient freedom in the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Netherlands but that they were discouraged in Taiwan and intimidated in South Korea not to accept assistance from the Asian Women’s Fund. Despite the financial generosity of the South Korean government’s own fund for former comfort women, the South Korean government and NGOs used it and other means as instruments of pressure and intimidation against Korean women who otherwise would have sought assistance from the Asian Women’s Fund in 1997. South Korean press reports on the comfort women issue often denigrate the Asian Women’s Fund by asserting that only a “small number” of women came forward to accept the Fund’s assistance because most former comfort women rejected the Fund because of its “unofficial” status. The press as well as the South Korean government continue to avoid acknowledging South Korea’s intimidation of its own comfort women in the episode of 1997.

Finally, the records of the Asian Women’s Fund and the government funds in South Korea and Taiwan suggest that no program of compensation/assistance likely would have drawn responses from former comfort women much beyond the approximately 500 that came forward in response to these funds. It appears that the social stigma of revealing one’s past as a former comfort woman remained a deterrent to many women who could have stepped forward.