South Korea has proposed a plan to resolve a colonial era dispute by compensating over a dozen victims of Japan's wartime forced labour through a Seoul-backed public foundation, Yonhap News Agency reported Monday.
South Korea's Foreign Minister Park Jin announced the proposal with the intention to resolve the issue of compensating 15 Koreans who won legal battles against two Japanese firms accused of mobilizing them for hard labour during World War II.
In 2018, South Korea's Supreme Court ordered Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and Nippon Steel Corp. to pay them compensation.
Under South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol, the Foundation for Victims of Forced Mobilization scheme, affiliated with the interior ministry, will collect "voluntary" donations from the private sector. It also plans to use the foundation, created in 2014, to compensate other plaintiffs who win pending cases.
The government is expected to seek donations from South Korean companies that benefited from a 1965 bilateral treaty, such as steelmaker POSCO, under which Tokyo offered USD 300 million in grants to Seoul, reported Yonhap News Agency.
Still, victims and supporting civic groups have strongly protested the plan floated earlier during a public hearing.
Tokyo has maintained that all reparation issues related to Japan's 1910-45 colonization of Korea were settled in a 1965 deal to normalize bilateral diplomatic ties.
The neighbouring countries held several rounds of official talks on the thorny matter over the past several months in line with the conservative Yoon administration's push for strengthening the trilateral security partnership with the United States and Japan to counter North Korea's military threats.
The two sides have tentatively agreed to create a "future youth fund" to sponsor scholarships for students, an informed source said.
Meanwhile, Seoul's top diplomat expressed hope in a statement that the two nations will honour a 1998 joint declaration adopted by then President Kim Dae-Jung and then Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, as per Yonhap News Agency.
According to the Japanese Foreign Ministry's statement, the two leaders declared their common determination to raise to a higher dimension the close, friendly and cooperative relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea which have been built since the normalization of their relations in 1965 so as to build a new Japan-Republic of Korea partnership towards the twenty-first century.
A group of progressive activists marched toward the foreign ministry in Seoul on January 18, 2023, to convey their letter of protest against the South Korean government's solution for addressing the issue of compensation for wartime forced labour.
( With inputs from ANI )
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