By Jun Ji-hye





Ban Ki-moon

Former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a potential leading presidential candidate, has been put in an awkward position over his past remarks supporting the Korea-Japan "comfort women" agreement reached in December 2015.

His praise for the deal, which was controversial, is giving his rivals ammunition amid the deepening diplomatic row between the two countries over a second statue of a small girl symbolizing Korean victims of Japan's wartime sex slavery. The statue was set up at the end of last month by civic groups outside the Japanese consulate in Busan.

Ban is expected to continue to come under attack for his past remarks in the lead-up to the presidential election this year, as controversy over the appropriateness of the deal is heating up.

Experts say he could hardly renew his past support for the deal in this situation as public sentiment toward the nation's former colonial ruler has worsened ― 59 percent of the public responded that they wanted the cancellation of the December 2015 agreement in a Realmeter survey, released Dec. 28.

"There will be no candidate who can easily say he or she will keep the deal, considering the strong public outcry," said Park Won-gon, an international relations professor at Handong Global University.

Ban expressed his support for the agreement during a phone call with President Park Geun-hye on New Years' Day 2016, calling it "Park's courageous decision" that led to the end of the feud between the two nations over the issue of Japan's sexual enslavement of Korean women before and during World War II.

He also said history would "highly value Park's vision" although criticism abounded against the Park administration for its failure to consult the surviving victims beforehand.

At the time, opposition lawmakers claimed that Ban made improper political comments as the U.N. chief in an apparent bid to be backed by President Park and her loyalists as a ruling Saenuri party candidate in the presidential election.

The lawmakers are now calling on Ban to clearly communicate his position, mindful that he has been seen as distancing himself from Park after she was impeached by the National Assembly, Dec. 9, for the high-profile corruption and influence-peddling scandal.

"Ban needs to explain his past comments when he returns home, Jan. 12," said Rep. Woo Sang-ho, the floor leader of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea, Monday.

"Ban praised the Park government's humiliating compromise with Japan. We cannot understand how the nation's career diplomat made such comments taking sides with Japan."

The statue in Busan is a copy of one that sits across the road from the Japanese embassy in Seoul. The Japanese government has strongly criticized Korean civic groups for erecting the comfort women statues in major cities, saying that Seoul has unilaterally broken the "final and irreversible" agreement between the two nations.

But Seoul has maintained that while it can suggest that the civic groups remove the statue, the government has no authority to take unilateral action.

As part of its retaliatory steps, Japan ordered its ambassador to Korea to as well as its consul-general in Busan, to come home Friday. The neighboring country also announced a halt to the ongoing negotiations to resume a Japan-Korea currency swap deal and the postponement of bilateral high-level economic discussions.

On Sunday, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe also demanded that Seoul remove the comfort woman statue in Seoul, along with the statue in Busan, claiming that his government has lived up to its end of the 2015 deal by providing 1 billion yen ($8.6 million) that was meant to care for the Korean victims.

Following the comment, the ruling and opposition parties spoke in rare unison, accusing Abe of trying to use the thorny issue for his own political gain as he seeks reelection.

Opposition parties renewed their demand to nullify the deal, saying that it was a verbal agreement between the two countries' foreign ministers, not a treaty.