Japan Urged to Apologize and Pay for Past Crimes

Pyongyang, April 2 (KCNA) -- A spokesman for the Association of Korean Victims of Forcible Drafting and their Bereaved Families issued a statement Thursday, 83 years since the Japanese imperialists fabricated and promulgated the criminal "National Mobilization Law".

The statement said that the law cooked up by the first Konoe Cabinet on April 1, 1938 was a fascist wartime draconic law to justify Japan's reckless expansion of aggression war and replenish human and material resources for its implementation in a coercive manner under the pretext of "mobilization".

Since the promulgation of this law up to August 1945 when the Japanese imperialists were defeated, Koreans numbering more than 8.4 million were taken to coal and other mines, shipbuilding sites, dam construction sites, railway project sites and other slave labor sites in Japan, to say nothing of those in Korea, and to battle fields of the Japanese imperialist aggression forces including China and the South Sea Islands, to undergo long-time harsh slave labor and maltreatment and to face the miserable fate of bullet shield, the statement said, and went on:

Since then the Japanese imperialists further pushed ahead with the "recruitment of comfort women" and abducted or kidnapped 200 000 Korean women ranging from teenage girls to married women to force them into sexual slavery for the beast-like Japanese imperialist aggression troops.

The Japanese imperialists forced many Koreans to be cannon fodder for the aggression war and to face sufferings and deaths as labor slaves and sexual slaves. Such atrocities against humanity are hideous state-sponsored crimes unprecedented in human history.

However, the authorities of Japan, far from deeply repenting of and offering apology for the crimes against humanity committed by the Japanese imperialists in the past, have employed all sorts of shameless tricks to evade the responsibility for them while doggedly denying and justifying them.

What is intolerable is that they are making ill-boding words in the international arena while regarding the DPRK, the biggest victim of the Japanese imperialists' crimes, as a thorn in the flesh, and openly revealing its attempt at reinvasion of the Korean peninsula. They are not only suppressing the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon) and Koreans in Japan, victims of the forcible drafting and their descendents, and applying sanctions to them but also seriously violating the rights to education and upbringing of Korean students and children in Japan.

We will never forget the cursed crimes committed by Japan but certainly force it to pay thousand-fold, no matter how much time may flow and how many times a generation is replaced by another. -0-