Source: AFP.
Date: 19 July 91.
Story Type: News.
Original Language: English.
Dateline: The Hague.
Byline: None.
Text: Abridged.
Brief Remark: Forwarded.
HUNDREDS PROTEST AS KAIFU LAYS WREATH FOR PRISON CAMP VICTIMS
Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu faced
hundreds of elderly demonstrators on Friday when he laid a wreath at a
memorial here for the victims of Japanese internment and prison camps in World
War Two.
The wreath laying, which a senior Japanese official said was an expression
of contrition, did not satisfy the demonstrators, who wanted financial
compensation for their suffering in the camps.
They picketed the building where Mr. Kaifu was meeting his Dutch
counterpart, Ruud Lubbers, for a bilateral meeting, carrying posters reading:
"Our blood, your wealth" and "Millions died in Nippon's camps".
The meeting took place on the second day of Mr. Kaifu's official two-day
visit here. On Thursday he met European Community leaders.
Sadaaki Numata, a spokesman for the Japanese prime minister, quoted him as
telling Mr. Lubbers about the demonstrators: "I know fully well that the scars
in their hearts will not heal easily."
Mr. Kaifu added that Japan was expressing its "sense of sincere contrition
at past Japanese actions" through efforts to promote non-militarism and peace.
Mr. Lubbers welcomed the laying of the Japanese wreath as a "positive
gesture" and added: "We cannot forget that page in our book of history, but we
can certainly turn a new page and this is what we are doing."
But this was not enough for the demonstrators bearing placards saying
"Boys 10 years old were separated from their mothers and put to work as
slaves" and "Japan, pay your debts of honour".
The demonstration was organised by the Foundation of Japanese Honorary
Debts, a pressure group which wants Japan to compensate survivors of Japanese
camps in the former Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.
The organisation's founder, Jack Stolk, said 26,242 men, women and
children died of a total of 141,000 Dutch people in the internment or prisoner
camps.
He wants Japan to make a formal apology for war-time atrocities and to pay
20,000 dollars to each of the dwindling band of survivors.
The demonstrators were contemptuous of the payments made by Japan under a
1951 peace treaty and a subsequent 1956 protocol-- one-time payments of about
200 dollars for internees and 130 dollars for prisoners of war.
The Japanese officials said that the Netherlands had waived all claims to
further reparations, a claim contested by the organisation which maintains
that individual claims are still valid and must be pressed.
The demonstrators crowded around reporters, competing with each other to
recount still-fresh memories of atrocities.
They told of traumatised children, of food rations of 100 grams of
worm-infested rice a day, of working on railways and in mines for seven days a
week with one rest day a month, ill with malaria and dysentery.
One woman said her mother was raped repeatedly "for two months, hour after
hour, day after day" at Blora in Java. She was 10 at the time and her mother
survived, she said, but her father was murdered.
Ex-prisoner Bertram Corts said: "In my camp there was a boy aged 13 who
was killed for trying to exchange a pair of shorts for some eggs. They pumped
him rectally with hot mud."
Greetje Kuiper, survivor of a camp in Java, said: "I feel they should pick
up Kaifu, put him in prison under the same conditions we had for three and a
half years, and make him kneel to our queen and ask forgiveness."
One demonstrator said of the wreath laid by Mr. Kaifu: "It's cheaper than
compensation."
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