"The fund will be dissolved as it will finish all its compensation programs by March 2007," said the Asian Women's Fund (AWF), a privately financed group headed by former prime minister Tomiichi Murayama.

"We believe the fund's atonement projects have achieved what they were established for," it said in a statement.

Japan has refused any official payouts to the victims, known euphemistically as "comfort women."

The fund was set up in 1995 by a left-leaning government to "convey the feelings of apology and remorse of the Japanese people and the government of Japan" and collected about 565 million yen (now 5.5 million dollars) in donations.

The group has provided two million yen, medical and welfare support and a letter of apology each to 285 women in the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan who came forward.

The fund also gave the same assistance minus the money to 79 Dutch women who were forced into sex by Japanese troops in Indonesia, and funded a welfare center in Indonesia for elderly survivors.

Historians say at least 200,000 young women, mostly Korean but also from Taiwan, China, the Philippines and Indonesia, were forced to serve as sex slaves in Japanese army brothels during the war.

Many women remain reluctant to come forward out of shame and others considered the fund to be too little and too late. China declined to take any money through the program.

The AWF called its work "atonement projects," avoiding use of the term compensation.

Former sex slaves have filed dozens of lawsuits against the Japanese government for compensation and apologies, which have been rejected one after the other by the courts.

Judges have ruled that a 20-year period for demanding compensation has expired and that treaties provided for reparations should be made to states, not individuals.

In the latest case, the Tokyo High Court on December 15 rejected demands that the Japanese government pay four Chinese women 23 million yendollars) each for being confined and repeatedly raped from 1942 to 1944 when they were aged 15 to 20.

Judge Makoto Nemoto said the state did not have responsibility for acts committed under the constitution which expired after Japan's defeat and that the statute of limitations had run out.

In response to the verdict, China called on Japan "to properly deal with these problems left over from history."

How Japan treats the dark chapter of its past came back into the open this month when Shinzo Abe, now acting secretary general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, admitted he pressured the publicly funded Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK) to tone down a 2001 documentary on sex slaves.

The liberal Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported that NHK cut out interviews with critics of Japan's wartime conduct to bow to pressure from politicians.

The documentary was on a mock trial, hosted by a women's rights group in Tokyo in December 2000, which found the late Emperor Hirohito guilty of allowing the use of "comfort women."

NHK officials denied Nagai's claims and demanded a correction from the Asahi, which has stood by its story.

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