• Military Sexual Slavery
  
• digitarts
  
• UN Women's Institutions
  Jointly Launch Womenwatch
  
  

Our Military Sexual Slavery Homepage at
http://witness.peacenet.or.kr/
is the result of the relentless efforts of a group of volunteers called "PeaceNet" in Korea, which I work with. Our main concern is to advocate peace on earth by contributing our expertise, especially by using our internet skills. We agreed that the issue was truly local, as well as global, and met the ultimate purpose of the network. We decided on the military sexual slavery issue as our first major project.

The issue of the Military Sexual Slavery took more than half a century from the end of WWII to emerge. It has been hidden for too long by the Japanese government and even by some victims themselves. The human suffering was so tragic it could make even the victims deaf-mutes. It required great courage, the denying one's dignity as a human being to expose and bear witness to this crime against humanity. Now, more than 150 former so called "comfort women", who are now grannys, are witness to the hidden truth. Last year, the UN Human Rights Commission accepted the special rapporteur's report which clarified the historical facts and adopted the recommendation and resolutions on this issue.

The Japanese government still doesn't admit their official responsibility for military sexual slavery. They have not yet disclosed their archives, and their official position is simply to insist that there is not enough evidence of the practice of the military sexual slavery. However, as the UN Special Report has rightly pointed out, there is no better evidence than that of the victims themselves. Yet their voices and appeals have had very little attention from the world community.

This issue is not for the one-shot coverage most media use. Rapidly changing contemporary civilization has brought humans a disease called "forgetting". Miscellaneous information such as sports news, and TV stars, cascade into the blank space of memory. Even though we cannot call this information "destructive", it is obvious that it creates the "indifferences" between valuables and invaluables, significants and insignificants. I believe that most threats to the human race comes from this "forgetting" and "indifference". Internet surfing may become another time-killing entertainment if there are no meaningful information resources for human values, like peace and the environment.

We believe this homepage should provide vivid materials to the people of the world to learn the history for this issue, which is one of the most shocking facts in human history. Now most of the former "comfort women" are very old. Their living voices will soon disappear. But on the internet, in cyberspace, they will live permanently as long as this network survives. In a sense, the homepage will be a monument of their suffering and courage, as witnesses to injustice and violence against women. Today the internet is crowded and polluted with commercial information, pornography, and other useless things. Amongst the junk this kind of information can enlighten people how to live for peace-making in the age of high technology.

All of the resources of our homepage were provided by one NGO - the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. Our role is simply to transmit their resources to the Internet. Of course, link sites and other Internet resources were collected by our volunteers. All Internet services - the leased line, server, and other work like programming, Web-authoring, scanning, layout, etc. are provided free by the volunteers. Unfortunately, we couldn't get a volunteer designer, but the witness of the Victims can offset all of our defects.

At the beginning of our project, we hoped to translate all of the resources into Japanese. However, there were difficulties to find the volunteers who were fluent in Japanese, and technically there was the difficulty of producing Japanese documents with a computer. Finally, we had to renunciate it and hope for Japanese or Korean Japanese participation in this volunteer work.

Three thousand people have visited our home page in its' first month. There are more than eighty visitors every day. Interestingly, one third of foreign accesses come from Japan. At present internet access speed between Korea and Japan is very slow because the routing path to Japan is mediated through North America. Moreover, our homepage does not contain Japanese documents, except some links to Japanese sites. Nevertheless, the access rate from Japan has sustained at the same level. Since the opening of our homepage we have exchanged related information with Japanese NGOs and emailed with some concerned people. This has confirmed our belief that the Internet is a good media channel to share information to build a better world.

In the long run we are planning for global network cooperation . Work like Web design, translation, even Web-authoring or programming can be supported by remote volunteers over the Internet. If the routing and traffic are too problematic, mirror sites could be established in other countries. In this way, anybody can promote and support the activities of other groups especially those working for peace and justice on earth.

The Internet gives us a light for the global cooperation of peace-makers. Now we are dreaming of "virtual peace solidarity".

Chun Eung Hwi is System operator of PeaceNet, and responsible for the establishment of the KSDN (Korea Sustainable Development Network), which was initiated by UNDP. She is now working as a network expert with an Internet Service Company. PeaceNet is a volunteer organization composed of engineers and common netizens.

Email: ehchun@peacenet.or.kr

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The three entities in the UN system specifically devoted to women's issues, the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), and the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW), have created WomenWatch, which was launched on International Women's Day, March 8, 1997.

WomenWatch is a gateway to UN information and data on women worldwide and an evolving electronic forum on global women's issues in the follow-up to the Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW). The Internet site provides up-to-date information on the UN's work on behalf of the women of the world and on the global agenda for improving the status of women. It is designed to serve as an important contribution to the outreach programmes of its collaborating partners, providing a cost-effective means to expand outreach and networking, and streamlining access to information.

The joint initiative responds to a growing demand for information which can be obtained today at unprecedented speed through the use of computer communication techonology. Women stand to benefit from these new technologies and to be on the cutting edge of their development. One of the objectives of WomenWatch is to enable more women to not only be mere users of computer networking but also producers and full beneficiaries as recommended by the Beijing Platform for Action.

The Internet site will be accessible through the World Wide Web at
http://www.un.org/womenwatch,
as well as through other Internet tools such as the electronic mail: womenwatch@un.org and the gopher: gopher://gopher.un.org The information will be organized in an Internet-accessible database to allow users in developing countries who do not have direct access to all Internet tools to retrieve the information. Efforts will also be made to repackage and redisseminate information to locations with no Internet access. Closer cooperation will be fostered with organizations that provide training in the use of electronic communication technologies.

For more information, contact:
DAW, Oliva Acosta, (212) 963 0272 acostao@un.org
UNIFEM, Melanie Roth, (212) 906 6897 melanie.roth@undp.org
INSTRAW, Julia Tavares, (809) 685 2111

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digitarts is an arts, culture and technology organisation dedicated to giving young women (as emerging artists) access to the knowledge and equipment necessary for the development of their arts & cultural practices in the area of new technologies.

And if you think that sounds like 'grant speak' then you'd probably be right. In 1996 digitarts was predominantly funded by the Community Cultural Development Board of the Australia Council (the federal government arts funding body) with a bit of extra help from the Brisbane City Council, the Youth Bureau and the Gaming Machine Community Benefit fund. digitarts has again received funding this year from the CCDB and also from Arts Queensland (state government arts funding body) - and as always we're waiting to hear about a few grants too. For me, the support of the funding bodies is evidence of how timely a project like ours is and acknowledgment of our success.

Why am I talking about funding bodies so much? I'm not crawling, it's just that I get sick of people saying that applying for grants to do projects is 'selling out' - grow a head - it's selling out about as much as struggling to keep up an arts practice on social security is - it's just a different system (albeit one with a shrinking budget - but where isn't that the case?) - guess I should get back to the point - give me a space and I'll rave on the topic of my choice

The story so far-

I'd been working in Community Arts for four years and had been introduced to the Internet through a project of Contact , another youth arts organisation based in Brisbane. I guess I've always been a closet geek and the project brought it all out. I got a buzz out of working on the Web but started to get a bit sick of working with blokes and saw the potential for an all-grrrl Internet arts project.

After securing funding for the project, I started digitarts in January '96. I wanted to give other young women the same opportunities I'd been given, (ie access to equipment & knowledge) helping them develop skills in information technology for the publication of their own work. Throughout '96 we ran a regular (free) workshop program where participants developed skills in computer use and Web page construction, in a low key, user-friendly grrrls-own space. The 'tarts have created a Website that includes a stack of individual pages as well as two issues of the ezine - grrrowl.

The creation of the ezine has been a response to the desire of some digitarts to work on a collective project and (like all good zines) to provide a forum for the dissemination of ideas that aren't often represented in mainstream media. The Web is a great place for people who are into self-publishing 'cos it's a narrowcast medium, not a broadcast one like tv and radio. This means that anyone (provided they can get access to the technology) can have their say.

Community radio and tv goes part of the way towards providing 'media space' for 'alternative' voices but being broadcast mediums, there's only so far they can stretch. Paper zines are about as close as you get to the Web in terms of the diversity of voice and freedom with which it is expressed. The one thing ezines have over their paper cousins (apart from sparing a few trees) is the simple fact that local publishing is automatically global publishing - your possible audience increases exponentially, especially when you register your zine with any of the online indexes and search engines. Even people with truly obscure interests are going to find someone (if not a dedicated newsgroup) online to connect with.

Zine producers and the Web are a perfect match. Zines need distribution and the Web needs CONTENT! (there's another grant application begging to be written). Of course no ezine, no matter how rough and amateur will ever match the personality of a hand written and lovingly photocopied paper zine, millions of colours and standard fonts have a lot to answer for

We're expanding our repertoire this year to include electronic music, digital animation and high end Web publishing - hopefully including Webcasting. Up until this point we've only had access to 'fat reduced low sodium cheese' machines and to a degree our work reflects that. This year we're really looking forward to getting our fingers on the keyboards of something with a bit more grunt.

Which brings me to our only problem - digitarts doesn't actually own any computers (I have two), we have to keep doing 'deals' to get access to other peoples. This gets exhausting after a while, so our current dream is to build our own tech lab with 8 top of the range PCs, not particularly easy to achieve but we've got a few scams up our sleeves ;-).

speak or die

violet

violet is the voice of digitarts, our reluctant leader. She wishes she had done computing instead of japanese at school and being a relatively new geek, is insanely jealous of all those nerds who grew up in the age of the amiga and 2400 baud modems (they're gonna rule the world if the don't already).

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