Stories written by Elisa Gahng
Elisa Gahng is a senior at the University of California at Berkeley and an intern with the Women of Colour Resource Centre in Oakland, CA.

JUSTICE LONG OVERDUE FOR KOREAN “COMFORT WOMEN”

By Elisa Gahng and - -
Surviving Korean \"comfort women\", forced to serve as sex slaves to Japanese military officers during WWII, have waited over half a century for an apology from the Japanese government, and with mounting international pressure, they just may get one, writes Elisa Gahng, a senior at the University of California at Berkeley and intern with the Women of Colour Resource Centre in Oakland, CA. In this article, Gahng writes that these women, now aged 65 to 80, were among 200,000 young women kidnapped from Korea\'s poorest regions. In three years, the average comfort woman was raped 7,500 times and some by as many as 30 military officers a day. Their quest for justice began in 1991 when a group of Korean grandmothers publicly told their tragic stories and filed a class action law suit against the Japanese government demanding reparations. Japan\'s government still refuses to assume responsibility and even denies the existence of comfort stations. But growing global pressure may turn the tide. Multiple inter- governmental agencies, such as the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO), have urged the Japanese government to make an official apology and assume responsibility.

WANTED: THREE MILLION PEOPLE ALIVE

By Elisa Gahng and - -
World Water Day -- celebrated each year on 22 March -- provides us with an opportunity to recognise the centrality of water to our daily lives, to poverty reduction, to our environment, and to the sustainable development of nations, writes Sir Richard Jolly, chair of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC). In this article for IPS, Jolly writes that top-down, supply-driven approaches to provide water and sanitation services have not worked, while treating water as a free good to be delivered weakens good water management including cost recovery and water conservation. Present levels of international aid going to water, sanitation, and hygiene are estimated at about five billion dollars per year. Yet Third World governments are spending roughly the same again. The author calls for a doubling of this level of investment and raising the share of national and international resources going to services in slums and urban shanty-towns and in rural areas. Better water, sanitation, and hygiene were and are the basis of better health in the industrialised nations. Without them, no amount of drugs, doctors, or hospitals will lift public health onto an equivalent level in the developing world.
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