Korea's other 'comfort women' seek payouts for serving in brothels for US troops
Veterans of brothels for US troops seek redress, as Seoul presses Japan to atone for sex slavery
Cho Myung-ja ran away from home as a teenager to escape a father who beat her, and found her way to the red light district in a South Korean town that hosts a large US army garrison.
There, in the early 1960s, her pimp sold her to one of the brothels allowed by the government to serve American soldiers.
"It was a hard life and we got sick," Cho, 76, said in an interview in her cluttered room in a shack outside Camp Humphreys, a busy US military garrison in the town of Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul.
On June 25, sixty-four years after the Korean war broke out, Cho joined 122 surviving "comfort women", as they were called, in a lawsuit against their government to reclaim, they say, human dignity and proper compensation.
The suit comes as an embarrassing distraction for the South Korean government, which has pushed Japan to properly atone for what it says were second world war atrocities including forcing women, many of them Korean, to serve as sex slaves for its soldiers.
The women claim the South Korean government trained them and worked with pimps to run a sex trade through the 1960s and 1970s for US troops, encouraged women to work as prostitutes and violated their human rights. They are claiming 10 million won (HK$76,000) for each plaintiff.