Dispute over peace statue: Steglitz-Zehlendorf sets a sign!

Dispute over peace statue: Steglitz-Zehlendorf sets a sign!

In a controversial decision, the Steglitz-Zehlendorf district plans to set up the setting of the "Ari" peace statue in the public street country, provided that the Korean Association is forced to remove the existing sculpture in Moabit. This decision was made during the meeting of the district council (BVV) this month, as the Tagesspiegel reported. The statue commemorates that over 200,000 Korean and Chinese women who were forced to provide sexual services during the Second World War as so -called consolation women by Japanese soldiers.

The current statue is in Berlin-Moabit and was built in 2020 to draw attention to gender-specific violence during the war, as the Korean Association explains on its blog. This statue is a symbol of memory work and the demand for recognition of the victims. However, the district office Mitte has now ordered the statue to remove the statue due to pressure on the part of the Japanese government. The Korean Association has taken legal action against this decision, while the future of the statue remains uncertain.

a place for the place of remembrance

The district prescribed Johanna Martens (Greens) emphasized that the memory of such crimes was not negotiable. Based on the city partnership with Songpa in Seoul, the discussion about the new location of the statue is underway, whereby the environment of the Krumme Lanke underground station is being discussed as a possible place. Thus, the statue could not only find a new home, but also continue to serve as a memorial against forgetting, according to the decision of BVV.

The Statue of Peace is part of a larger, civil society engagement that has already combined numerous organizations to keep the memory of the “consolation women” and continue to put their concerns into public awareness. Support for these initiatives was also made from South Korea, whereby the statue was originally brought to Berlin as the donation of the "Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan", as the information from the Korea Association showed.