Paek Sun-Joo was an 18-year-old street child when she was sold to a 38- year-old Chinese man more than two years ago.

“[The traffickers] would gather people wearing rags, appearing to be compassionate and pity them, giving them something to eat and telling them that in China they would be able to feed and clothe themselves adequately,” Paek told RFA reporter Han Min.

“It is easy to be tricked when you are starving, and somebody gives you some food, telling you that there will be plenty more for you if you go with them,” she said.  [Radio Free Asia]

This happens because North Korea flouts its previous commitments and squanders its money on arms instead of food, because South Korea does everything it can to turn North Korean refugees away, and because China can’t seem to read the copy of the U.N. Convention on Refugees it signed.  Our own State Department, after flagrantly disregarding the North Korean Human Rights Act for more than two years, can’t wait to reward everyone who is responsible for this crime, even to the point of seriously suggesting that North Korea may soon be ready for full diplomatic relations.  On what basis, exactly, should we believe that either China or North Korea will now begin to honor its commitments to us when both have shreded at least a dozen other international agreements and pimped out an entire people to sustain Kim Jong Il’s belligerence? 

It’s stories like this that deprive me of any ability to get excited about “comfort women” resolutions relating to events 60 years ago.  As terrible as those events were, to me, you lose your moral authority to complain about things that can’t be undone if you’re not saying anything about things that still can be.  I see China and South Korea making enormous political capital out of the comfort women of the past, but they can’t even bring themselves to pull out of the comfort women of the present.

Some day, there will be a Truth Commission, and I predict here and now that the South Koreans will try to sanitize the fact that the government they elected provided the soft background music while China raped its sisters and daughters.