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S. Korea to hold talks with Japan on labor camps as world heritage

Xinhua, May 21, 2015 Adjust font size:

South Korea's government officials plan to hold talks with their Japanese counterparts in Tokyo Friday about Japan's attempt to list 23 of its industrial sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution as UNESCO world heritage, Seoul's foreign ministry said Thursday.

Officials from South Korea's foreign ministry and cultural heritage administration, led by a director general-level diplomat, will meet with their Japanese counterparts to express concerns over Japan's attempt and urge them to come up with ways of easing Seoul's concerns.

It would be the first inter-governmental dialogue between the two nations after concerns emerged in South Korea about Japan's push to list the 23 industrial sites, including seven slave labor camps for Koreans during World War II, as UN world heritage sites.

Under the 1910-45 Japanese colonial rule, some 57,900 Koreans were held captive and forced to work at the sites, with the severity of labor claiming 94 lives of the forced workers there.

South Korea has denounced Japan for its push to list wartime labor camps as world heritage, saying such attempt represented Japan's continued efforts to glorify and whitewash its wartime history.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye said Wednesday that Japan' s push would inevitably "cause an unnecessary division between countries" as Japan looked away from its history of inhumane forced labor at some of the sites.

It was her first remarks on the controversy, made during her meeting with UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova who came to Seoul to attend the World Education Forum (WEF) 2015.

Park said the world heritage should play a role of enhancing dialogue, reconciliation and amity between countries, not encouraging cross-border conflicts.

Bokova said in response that she will clearly deliver Park's message to the head of the World Heritage Committee, which would make a final decision on whether to list the forced labor camps as world heritage during a meeting in Germany scheduled to run from June 28 to July 8. Endi