KMT seeks to revoke Chen’s benefits
　

COMING THIS FALL: The KMT caucus said it would prioritize passing an amendment first proposed last year to scrap benefits for any ex-president convicted in a first trial
　

By Shih Hsiu-chuan and Loa Iok-sin
STAFF REPORTER, WITH STAFF WRITER
Sunday, Sep 13, 2009, Page 1

Hours after former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) was convicted of graft on Friday, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus said it would seek to scrap monetary benefits for retired heads of state convicted in their first trial.

KMT Legislator Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇) brought up the amendment at a dinner held by the Presidential Office on Friday night for lawmakers to exchange ideas with President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) and Vice Premier Eric Chu (朱立倫).

Wu Yu-sheng proposed that the amendment be retroactive.

“It’s not a political vendetta against Chen,” he said, “but if you think about it, it doesn’t make sense to spend taxpayers’ money on a corrupt politician.”

KMT legislative caucus whip Lin Yi-shih (林益世) said Ma supported the idea, which the KMT caucus will list as a priority for the legislative session that begins on Friday.

Under the Act Governing Preferential Treatment for Retired Presidents and Vice Presidents (卸任總統副總統禮遇條例), during the first four or eight years after leaving office — depending on whether a president served one or two terms — a former head of state receives NT$250,000 a month, in addition to an annual stipend for office expenses, staff and transportation. The stipend starts at NT$8 million (US$245,000) the first year and decreases by NT$1 million each year, dropping no lower than NT$5 million.

A former head of state loses the benefits if he or she takes up a paid public position; is convicted in a final trial of sedition, treason or corruption; loses his or her citizenship; or moves abroad.

“I think the privileges for former presidents and vice presidents should be suspended if they are found guilty in the first instance,” Wu Yu-sheng said after the dinner.

He first proposed the amendment last year, when it cleared a legislative committee but was not put to a vote.

The amendment would revoke the benefits after a conviction in the first trial, but reinstate them if the person in question is later cleared. Benefits lost during the interval would be compensated.

Chen and his wife Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍) on Friday received life sentences and fines of NT$200 million and NT$300 million respectively.

A prisoner serving a life sentence can apply for parole after 15 years.

The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday criticized the proposed amendment.

“The purpose of the [amendment] is to hound Chen Shui-bian and humiliate him and his family,” DPP Legislator Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) said.

DPP Legislator Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) said the move “further proves that the ruling in Chen’s case was the result of political manipulation.”

Separately, staff at the Taipei Detention Center where Chen is held said the former president seemed composed after receiving the more than 1,000-page ruling.

Chen read it and took notes, the staff said.

After waking up yesterday, Chen watched TV, read newspapers and listened to the radio, occasionally taking notes, the staff added.

Meanwhile, approximately 30 people gathered outside the home of Judge Tsai Shou-hsun (蔡守訓) yesterday to protest his ruling.

“Tsai Shou-hsun, we think you are shameless,” they shouted.

An argument ensued after neighbors complained about the noise.

One of Tsai’s neighbors shouted: “Is there no justice in Taiwan? If you’re involved in corruption, you should go to jail.”

Police were present in case of physical confrontations.

Beijing attacks US over duties on Chinese tires

REUTERS, BEIJING AND WASHINGTON
Sunday, Sep 13, 2009, Page 1

China lashed a US decision to impose duties on Chinese-made tires, calling it flagrant protectionism that sends the wrong signal before the next G20 summit and risks a “chain reaction” that could slow global recovery.

“China strongly condemns this grave act of trade protectionism by the US,” Chinese Ministry of Commerce Spokesman Yao Jian (姚堅) said in a statement issued on the ministry Web site yesterday, hours after the administration of US President Barack Obama announced the move.

The new duty of 35 percent will take effect on Sept. 26 and adds to an existing 4 percent duty. The extra duty will fall to 30 percent in the second year and 25 percent in the third year.

Those levels are lower than the US International Trade Commission recommended earlier this year, but likely high enough to restrict tire imports significantly from China, if not shut them out completely.

“The president decided to remedy the clear disruption to the US tire industry based on the facts and the law in this case,” White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement.

The United Steelworkers union, which represents workers at many US tire production plants, filed a petition earlier this year asking for the protection.

It said a tripling of tire imports from China to about 46 million last year from about 15 million in 2004 had cost more than 5,000 US tire worker jobs.

Beijing’s reaction was unusually detailed and vehement.

“This step not only violates the rules of the WTO, it is also contrary to the relevant commitments that the United States government made at the G20 financial summit,” Yao said.

He accused the Obama administration of trade protection measures without sufficient proof and of bowing before domestic protectionist forces.

“This step has harmed China, as well as harming US interests, and even more, it sends the wrong trade protectionist signal to the world before the Pittsburgh summit,” he said.

Obama, Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and other leaders will meet for the next G20 summit of major rich and developing economies in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, later this month.

Yao said the duties could spark a “chain reaction of trade protectionist measures that could slow the current pace of revival in the world economy.”

China has increasingly turned to domestic demand to shore up its growth during the global economic slump.

But for now, exports remain a key part of China’s economic engine, and its relatively cheap exports to the US have long faced complaints from US manufacturing groups and trade unions who say Beijing is unfairly overwhelming other competitors.

Yao said there was no evidence of that in the tire case, and he said Beijing could take its complaint to the WTO.

No US tire manufacturer supported the case and one, Cooper Tire, publicly opposed it.

David Spooner, outside counsel for the Chinese tire industry, said: “These tariffs are unwarranted. It’s troubling that the administration would invoke an import surge safeguard over the objections of US industry and in response to falling imports. Not a single US tire company supports these taxes.”

US tire wholesalers and retailers also warned a double-digit duty would cause them to cut jobs.

They argued that major US tire manufacturers no longer wanted to produce the low-priced tires imported from China.

“We are certainly disheartened that the president bowed to the union and disregarded the interests of thousands of other American workers and consumers,” said Marguerite Trossevin, counsel to the American Coalition for Free Trade in Tires.

Urumqi sentences Uighurs amid scare

REUTERS AND AFP, BEIJING AND LONDON
Sunday, Sep 13, 2009, Page 1
　

“This step not only violates the rules of the WTO, it is also contrary to the relevant commitments that the United States government made at the G20 financial summit.”— Yao Jian, Chinese Ministry of Commerce spokesman

A court in Xinjiang has tried and sentenced three suspects accused of joining in an outburst of needle-stabbing that ignited sometimes deadly riots and deepened ethnic divisions in the tense frontier region.

The Intermediate Court of Urumqi yesterday announced jail sentences of up to 15 years against the suspects — the first to appear before a judge over the scare — the Xinhua news agency reported.

Muhutaerjiang Turdi, a 34-year-old man, and Aimannisha Guli, a 22-year-old woman, were jailed for 10 years and seven years respectively. They were accused of using a syringe to threaten a taxi driver into giving them 710 yuan (US$103), Xinhua reported.

In a separate trial in the same court, Yilipan Yilihamu, 19, was sentenced to 15 years on a charge of “spreading false dangerous substances.”

He was accused of jabbing a woman with a pin while she bought fruit at a stall, Xinhua said.

The report said the defendants were Uighurs.

Urumqi has been struggling to return to order after panic and protests over claims that Uighurs used syringes to attack residents, especially members of China’s Han ethnic Chinese majority, who many Uighurs see as an unwelcome and growing presence in the region.

TIBET

Meanwhile, a British minister underlined London’s support for greater Tibetan autonomy on an unprecedented visit to Lhasa last week.

Junior Foreign Office Minister Ivan Lewis visited China from Monday to Thursday and made the first ever trip to Tibet by a British government member, 18 months after an internationally criticized Chinese crackdown in Tibet.

“This is a historic visit,” the office quoted him as saying on Friday, adding that it was in the context of “our decision to change UK policy, and the significant international concern following the events in March 2008.”

“We recognise Tibet as an autonomous region of China ... But long-term stability can only be achieved through respect for human rights and greater autonomy,” the statement quote him as saying.

“This depends on substantive dialogue between the Chinese government and the representatives of the Dalai Lama,” he said.

In Tibet, Lewis met the chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Drepung Monastery.

Ahead of the visit, pro-Tibet campaigners urged Lewis to speak out against China’s rule of the Himalayan territory and human rights abuses there.

Suspicion rife in US of meddling in Chen trial
　

‘STIFF’: Organizations, newspapers and wire agencies expressed some reservations about the severity of the sentences given to the former president and his wife
　

By William Lowther
STAFF REPORTER , WASHINGTON
Sunday, Sep 13, 2009, Page 3

“Chen’s real ‘crime’ is that he pushed the entrenched [KMT] regime out of office in 2000.”— Bob Yang, FAPA president

There is widespread suspicion in the US that politics played a role in the sentencing of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and his wife Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍) on Friday.

“This is political persecution by judicial means,” said Bob Yang (楊英育), president of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA), a Washington-based advocacy organization of Taiwanese-Americans.

The LA Times called the sentence “unexpectedly stiff” and said the trial was “steeped in politics.”

The newspaper quoted Bonnie Glaser, a specialist on Taiwanese politics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as saying: “It was a quite harsh sentence; it is going to be hard for people to say that it was not politically motivated and that could have profound political implications.”

“Chen’s real ‘crime’ is that he pushed the entrenched [Chinese Nationalist Party, KMT] regime out of office in 2000 and moved Taiwan in the direction of freedom and independence,” Yang said.

“Many international scholars have expressed concern about the legal process. If we examine similar past graft cases in Taiwan and other countries ... this unusually heavy sentence given to Chen only reinforces the belief of many Taiwanese citizens and international scholars that the charges against Chen are politically motivated,” he said.

“FAPA calls upon the KMT authorities to release former president Chen pending the further appeal procedures, which are bound to take a long time. His incarceration is making it sheer impossible for him to build an adequate defense, denying him a truly fair trial,” Yang said.

The Associated Press, whose reports are carried by thousands of newspapers in the US, said the conviction marked a “watershed in Taiwan’s turbulent political history” and was a “crucial test for the island’s still-evolving democracy.”

It added: “While most Taiwanese believe that Chen is guilty of at least some of the charges against him, the severity of his sentence prompted some critics to charge that he was persecuted for his pro-independence views and his central role in ending the 50-year monopoly on power of the now-resurgent Nationalists.”

“The big question for Taiwan now is whether Chen’s pro-­independence allies will capitalize on Ma’s weakened position — and on any wave of anger stemming from Chen’s heavy sentence — to sidetrack the new president’s rapidly developing China policy,” it said.

TV networks and news radio stations gave the story of Chen’s sentencing major play for most of the day, but there was no official comment from either the White House or the US State Department.

Murder probe reveals nothing new
　

By Bruce Jacobs 家博
Sunday, Sep 13, 2009, Page 8

When the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) announced it would reinvestigate two of the remaining unsolved murder cases from 1980 and 1981, many people hoped that new information would be found. The murder of the mother and twin daughters of then-imprisoned provincial assemblyman Lin Yi-hsiung (林義雄) on Feb. 28, 1980, and the death and apparent murder of Chen Wen-cheng (陳文成), a Taiwanese professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, on July 3, 1981, following his interrogation by the Taiwan Garrison Command created great concern in Taiwan. These murders took place after several years of liberalization under then-president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), a liberalization that came to a dramatic halt with the widespread arrests following the Kaohsiung Incident on Dec. 10, 1979.

The Ma government requested that chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court’s Procuracy (最高法院檢察署檢察總長) coordinate the investigation of the two cases. The chief prosecutor brought together Taipei prosecutors, the police, the Bureau of Investigation, forensic experts and detective bureaus on March 13 to begin the new investigation. Unfortunately, the recently released 50-page report reveals almost nothing new. Put in Chinese terms, the report is 50 pages of “empty words.” Among the many names mentioned in the report, this writer’s appears very frequently.

The report does reveal that Lin’s telephone was constantly monitored, that all calls in and out were recorded, and it mentions many such phone calls (page 11). But the report fails to mention my phone call to the twins around noon on Feb. 28, possibly only a few minutes before they were murdered.

Instead, the report repeats the old line that “Lin’s neighbors identified him as going twice to Lin’s house at noon on the day of the case ... Thus, Bruce Jacobs became the first object of suspicion of the special investigation team. But Bruce Jacobs denied he went to the Lin family house at noon on that day and pressed the door bell. Furthermore, the police had searched his home and did not discover any evidence. The case did not develop and Bruce Jacobs left Taiwan in May 1980” (pages 8-9).

The report also fails to mention that the day I finally left Taiwan I was subpoenaed by the prosecutor’s office and again questioned. This time I was allowed to question the one so-called eye-witness, a lady in her 50s who spoke only Hakka.

I asked her: “How many foreigners with beards have you seen?”

She answered: “One.”

I then asked: “If you have seen only one foreigner with a beard, then how do you know it was me that you saw.”

She answered: “Because I have only seen one foreigner with a beard, therefore I know it was you.”

Of course, the prosecution realized it had no case that would stand up in open court and I was released and permitted to go home after being under “police protection” for more than three months. None of this appears in the report even though it was clearly on the record, just as my phone call to the twins should have been on the record.

On pages 13 to 14 the report also mentions some blood spots found in my residence at International House, just across the street from the Lin family residence. The report tells how the police apparently tried unsuccessfully to find evidence of my blood type in many places, including clinics and from my former in-laws. According to the report, they were looking for people with Type O blood. I did not know about this search at the time but, if they had asked, I would have willingly told them my blood type was B positive.

On the night of Feb. 28 at the Jen-Ai Hospital, when I finally learned that auntie and the twins had been murdered, several people said it was the security agencies who had murdered Lin’s family.

I responded: “It’s impossible. They couldn’t be so stupid.”

At that time, the Chen and the Chiang Nan (江南) murder cases still had not taken place. Only with the full investigation of many US detectives did we learn of the involvement of Taiwan’s security agencies in Chiang Nan’s murder on Oct. 15, 1984.

Even today, one can see evidence of how flippantly this evidence was viewed in Taiwan at the time. Admiral Wang Hsi-ling (汪希苓), one of the most involved people in the Chiang Nan case, had a beautiful house built for him at the Ching-mei military prison and court. He even had an additional outdoor room so he could meet his girlfriends. In 2007, many of Taiwan’s former elite participated at Wang’s 80th birthday celebration.

In 1980, I thought either a Chinese Communist agent had come into Taiwan to murder the Lin family and create social disorder or that a crazy person — incited by the media that stirred hate against the Kaohsiung defendants — had killed auntie and the girls. Now, I believe that in order to examine the record properly, the files of the many security agencies need a complete re-examination. Only then can Taiwan begin the genuine Truth and Reconciliation process necessary to heal the wounds from the past.

Bruce Jacobs is professor of Asian Languages and Studies and director of the Taiwan Research Unit at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Visit by the Dalai Lama a test of democracy
　

By Lu I-ming 呂一銘
Sunday, Sep 13, 2009, Page 8

The Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama recently visited Taiwan to pray for the victims of Typhoon Morakot. In the face of constant pressure from Beijing and international media coverage of the visit, the Dalai Lama, in his profound wisdom and benevolence, turned the visit into a display of passive resistance and peace in the spirit of Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi.

The Buddhist leader’s visit to Taiwan was not a big matter. As a US Department of State official said, Washington did not believe it would “result in increased tension in the region.” But Beijing did all it could to add fuel to the flames and even enlisted the help of Taiwanese gangsters in China to organize protests against the spiritual leader in Taiwan, while Taiwan’s pro-China media outlets became mouthpieces of the Chinese government. In doing so, they sacrificed their credibility and lost more than they gained.

During his visit, the Dalai Lama remained composed while being interviewed by media outlets and said he was not disappointed about not meeting President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).

In response to speculation that the spiritual leader’s visit would have an adverse impact on cross-strait relations, Ma said it was premature to jump to that conclusion.

Some critics said the visit was a result of political scheming, but the Dalai Lama said he was here purely on a religious mission, although some “specialists” in Taiwan tried to second-guess his motives. He also suggested that the protesters could visit China to promote democracy. There is no doubt that all these were directed at Ma and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao (胡錦濤).

Every place the Dalai Lama visited, people could feel the warmth he brought. When typhoon survivors from Siaolin Village (小林) in Kaohsiung County, which was washed away by floods, told him their family members were buried under mud and rubble, he immediately spread a waterproof mat on the ground and began a ritual of blessing. Such behavior moved the hearts of numerous disaster victims.

When he heard someone crying out loud: “Someone has cancer. She needs your help” as he walked out of the venue for a ritual, he performed a forehead-to-forehead blessing service and gave the patient medication. This scene is in stark contrast to the hypocrisy of politicians and their empty words.

In 1959, dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) recognized the temporary government of the Dalai Lama as the legitimate Tibetan government in accordance with Article 120 of the Constitution and said the Republic of China would continue to work to achieve the goal of self-determination together with the Tibetan people.

Whether Tibet should be separated from China is mentioned in both Taiwan’s and China’s constitutions. As such, if Taiwan were to cooperate with Beijing and take a harsher approach toward the matter, it would not reflect well on Taiwan.

The Dalai Lama’s nephew, Khedroob Thondup, once said: “This is not communist Taiwan; it’s democratic Taiwan.” The question is, can Taiwan hold up to its democratic ideals.

Lu I-ming is the former publisher and president of Taiwan Shin Sheng Daily News.