US military accused of direct hand in sex trade in S Korea

A group of South Korean women, who worked as sex-workers during the Korean conflict, have accused some former leaders of their country for pushing them to have
sex with the American soldiers who supported their nation in its war against North Korea, a media report here said.

They also accused the past South Korean governments, and the US military, of having a direct hand in sex trade from the 1960s through the 1980s, working together to build a testing and treatment system to ensure that prostitutes were disease-free for American troops, the New York Times reported.

While the women have made no claims that they were coerced into prostitution by South Korean or American officials during those years, the daily said, they accused successive Korean governments of hypocrisy in calling for reparations from Japan
while refusing to take a hard look at their own history.
    
"Our government was one big pimp for the US military," one of the women, Kim Ae-ran, 58, was quoted as saying in a recent interview.
   
Scholars on the issue, NYT said, contend that the South Korean government was motivated in part by fears that the American military would leave their land, and that it wanted to do whatever it could to prevent that.
    
But the women allege that the government viewed them as commodities to be used to shore up the country's struggling economy in the decades after the Korean War, it added. 

They also alleged the state of sponsoring classes for them in basic English and etiquette  to help them sell themselves more effectively. The newspaper also quoted them as saying that the government sent bureaucrats to praise them for earning dollars when South Korea was desperate for foreign currency.

"They urged us to sell as much as possible to the GI's, praising us as 'dollar-earning patriots,'" Kim was quoted as saying. 

The paper quoted scholars as saying that the US military became involved in attempts to regulate the trade in so-called camp towns surrounding the bases because of worries about sexually transmitted diseases.
    
In one of the most incendiary claims, the NYT report, some women say that the American military police and South Korean officials during the period regularly raided clubs looking for women who were thought to be spreading diseases.
    
They picked out the sex-workers, who were ill, using the number tags the brothels forced them to wear to facilitate soldiers identify their partners, the paper quoted the women as saying.
    
The Korean police would then detain the prostitutes, lock them up in so-called monkey houses and would force them to take medicines until they were well, the paper said.     The women, who are seeking compensation and an apology, have compared themselves to the so-called comfort women who have won widespread public sympathy for being forced into prostitution by the Japanese during World War II.
    
Whether prostitutes by choice, need or coercion, the women say, they were all victims of government policies.  The South Korean Ministry of Gender Equality, which
handles women's issues, declined to comment on the former prostitutes' accusations, the paper said. 

The American military command in Seoul, however, responded with a general statement saying that the military "does not condone or support the illegal activities of human
trafficking and prostitution," NYT said.
    
The daily claimed that it interviewed eight women who worked in brothels near American bases, and it reviewed South Korean and American documents, which provide some support for many of the women's claims, though most are snapshots in time.

In some sense, the paper says the women's allegations are not surprising. It has been clear for decades that South Korea and the US military tolerated prostitution near bases, even though selling sex is illegal in South Korea.
    
Bars and brothels have long lined the streets of the neighbourhoods surrounding American bases in South Korea, as is the case in the areas around military bases around the world.
    
But the women say few of their fellow citizens know how deeply their government was involved in the trade in the camp towns, the NYT said.