Pyongyang, August 15 (KCNA) -- A spokesperson for the Korean Committee on Measures for the Sexual Slavery for Japanese Army and Drafting Victims issued a statement on Saturday on the lapse of 75 years since the defeat of the Japanese imperialists who inflicted untold misfortune and pain upon the Korean nation.

Noting that though it is said that memories of the past get vague with the passage of the time, the Korean people clearly remember the past crimes of Japan, the atonement for which it desperately shuns, said the statement

It went on:

Had 200 000 Japanese women been forced into sexual slavery by foreign troops, several millions of Japanese people been subject to miserable deaths after being forcibly brought abroad and the Japanese people been deprived of their family and personal names and banned from talking in Japanese, the Japanese people would never forget it.

But Japan, far from atoning for its crime-woven past, has desperately discriminated against and suppressed the Koreans in Japan and pursued policies hostile to the DPRK, adding fuel to the hatred of the Korean people toward it.

The Korean Committee on Measures for the Sexual Slavery for Japanese Army and Drafting Victims stated as follows on behalf of the victims of hideous inhuman crimes, committed by the Japanese imperialists, and their bereaved families:

First, the Japanese authorities should keenly realize their national responsibility for the inhuman crimes against the Korean people and make a sincere apology and reparation before it is too late.

All the inhuman crimes the Japanese imperialists committed against the Korean people including sexual slavery for the Japanese army and drafting of Korean people were not committed by an individual solider or an official at his will but premeditated and perpetrated by the "great Japanese empire" through invocation of state power and they were the products of the heinous policy pursued by it to exterminate the Korean nation.

Second, the Japanese authorities should immediately stop the hateful distortion of history and the impudent moves to revive the old dream for the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", seeking to seize other's territory.

The Korean Committee on Measures for the Sexual Slavery for Japanese Army and Drafting Victims will trace and investigate all the inhuman crimes committed by Japan against the Korean people to the last, record them in history and stage a bolder struggle in demand of Japan's atonement for the past crimes until the Japanese government make a sincere apology and reparation to the Korean people. -0-