Listen to the voice

Politics delayed release of milk powder reports
　

ONE IN TEN: A government food watchdog in China said that almost 10 percent of milk and drinking yogurt samples from three major dairy firms contained melamine

AGENCIES, SHANGHAI AND WELLINGTON
Sunday, Sep 21, 2008, Page 1

New Zealand diplomats in Beijing knew in the middle of last month about the contaminated milk scandal in China, but lacked sufficient information to make an official report, the foreign ministry said yesterday.

New Zealand dairy giant Fonterra has been under fire for not acting immediately when it knew its Chinese joint venture company Sanlu had sold tainted milk powder.

The foreign ministry said Fonterra gave an informal indication to a New Zealand embassy official on Aug. 14 about reports of a small number of sick children, and that Sanlu appeared to have been receiving contaminated milk.

Five days later, Fonterra sought advice from the embassy about how the Chinese government would respond to notification of a local health issue.

The embassy advised that the Chinese central government would normally be informed by local authorities.

Fonterra then urged local authorities to order a full product recall and the embassy informed the ministry of foreign affairs and trade in Wellington, the ministry said.

The ambassador then told the ministry that Fonterra appeared to have a sensitive problem and the embassy would report formally when it was confident about the information it was receiving.

A formal report was finalized on Sept. 5 and at a special meeting of ministers on Sept. 8 “instructions were given to the embassy in Beijing to contact relevant central government agencies in China to convey the views and concerns of the New Zealand government.”

A full recall of the contaminated milk powder was ordered on Sept. 11.

Fonterra chief executive Andrew Ferrier has repeatedly said that the company tried to “do the right thing” in China by working within the Chinese system once Fonterra directors were alerted to the poisoned milk on Aug. 2.

Meanwhile, China ordered widespread checks on dairy products and a recall of tainted items as a scandal that began with powdered baby formula and spread to milk sparked an outcry from China’s trading partners.

Malaysia joined Singapore in banning Chinese milk imports while a dairy company in Japan pulled Chinese products from supermarket shelves following a similar move in Hong Kong after products were found contaminated with potentially deadly melamine.

China’s State Council, which has ordered the comprehensive checks, promised to punish enterprises and government leaders responsible for the scandal, the Xinhua news agency reported late on Friday.

“Local authorities should rectify the dairy industry so as to bring a fundamental change to the dairy market and products,” Xinhua quoted the council as saying.

The council also called on medical authorities to give free examinations and treatment to infants who fell ill after drinking contaminated milk, Xinhua said.

Panicked parents have crowded China’s hospitals and demanded redress since officials and the Sanlu Group, the country’s biggest maker of infant milk powder, said last week that babies developed kidney stones and complications after drinking milk made from powder tainted with melamine, a compound used in making plastics.

At the latest count, 6,244 children have become ill, four have died and 158 are suffering acute kidney failure.

A government food quality watchdog in China has said nearly 10 percent of milk and drinking yogurt samples from three major dairy companies contained melamine.

Liquid milk and yogurt batches from China Mengniu Dairy Co and Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group Co contained melamine. The substance was also found in several samples of dairy products from the Bright Dairy group.
　

Listen to the voice

Peng tells details of escape from KMT
　

PIONEER: After escaping Taiwan using false identification, democracy pioneer Peng Ming-min had a problem when he finally arrived in Sweden: proving that he was himself
　

By Loa Iok-Sin
STAFF REPORTER
Sunday, Sep 21, 2008, Page 3
　

“It’s true that our democracy is the result of hard battles fought by our democracy pioneers, but we must not forget many of our friends in other countries who provided so much help to us and would never boast about what they’ve done.”— Peng Ming-min, democracy pioneer

Democracy pioneer Peng Ming-min (彭明敏) and those who helped him escape the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime in 1970 to seek political asylum in Sweden gave detailed accounts of the well-planned journey at a press conference in Taipei yesterday.

Before 1963, Peng’s life seemed to be perfect — he had served as the youngest chair of National Taiwan University’s Political Science Department from 1961 to 1962; he was appointed an advisor to the Republic of China’s delegation to the UN Assembly in New York; he had been received by dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) in a private audience and he was nominated as one of the 10 “outstanding young people.”

At the time, KMT officials had hinted to Peng in private that “when a reshuffle took place in the government, I would be considered for a high-level appointment. They implied that it was merely a matter of time and of my intention,” Peng wrote in his English-language memoir titled A Taste of Freedom.

However, Peng took another path and he put his thoughts into action in 1964 by co-authoring the “Declaration of Formosan Self-Salvation” with two of his students, Hsieh Tsung-min (謝聰敏) and Wei Ting-chao (魏廷朝).
　

The declaration challenged the KMT regime’s policy of retaking China militarily, called for democratic reform and urged Taiwanese to rise against the KMT regime if it refused to answer the call.

The three did not get a chance to distribute the declaration as they were arrested early in the morning of Sept. 20, 1964, with 10,000 copies ready for distribution.
　

By 1969, Peng drew up a plan that led to his successful escape to Sweden in 1970.

Yesterday — marking the 44th anniversary of Peng’s arrest — Peng and two Japanese who played a key role in his escape decided to shed light on the details of Peng’s escape, which had remained a mystery for years

Munakata Takayuki, one of the two Japanese, told a gathering in Taipei yesterday that he had been in touch with Peng secretly since 1968, when Peng was still under house arrest.

Munakata had long been an active member of the World United Formosans for Independence (WUFI), and is currently a WUFI central standing committee member.

“In February 1969, Peng asked if it would be possible to escape from Taiwan because he could have been imprisoned again or even assassinated,” he said. “I promised to help him work out a plan right away.”

Munakata suggested that leaving the country in disguise with a foreign passport would be the safest way for Peng to escape.

Soon, Munakata went to close friend Abe Kenichi, who agreed to loan his passport to Peng.

“I spent nine months studying how to change the passport picture without it being noticeable” while Peng tried to change his appearance, Munakata said, showing three pictures that Peng sent him at the time.

In the three pictures, Peng changed his appearance by wearing a wig, growing a beard, or wearing glasses.

“As you can see, the first two pictures look really fake, and finally the third one looks more natural, so we decided to use the third one,” Munakata said, laughing.

As the two planned Peng’s “escape appearance,” Munakata sent Abe to Taipei to give his passport to Peng.

“It’s amazing how much trust we had in each other, because we had never met,” Peng said. “In order to make it easier for Abe to recognize me, we set up a meeting date, time, location and I told him I’d be carrying an umbrella.”

Finally, the two met and Abe handed his passport and flight ticket to Peng. Peng replaced Abe’s picture with his own and left Taipei for Hong Kong.

“I stayed in my hotel in Taipei and was very nervous all the time until two days later when I received a tourist brochure — a signal that Peng had arrived in Sweden safely,” Abe said.

Afterwards, Abe went to the Japanese embassy in Taipei to report his “missing” passport, and was issued a new one in 10 days.

“I traveled with my new passport to Manila the next day without any problem — thanks to the low-tech immigration service,” Abe said. “I would have been caught if the immigration system were computerized as it is today.”

From Hong Kong, Peng hopped from Bangkok to the then-Soviet Union, made a stop in Denmark and finally arrived in Stockholm.

“Through human rights organizations, Sweden had already agreed to grant me political asylum prior to my departure,” Peng said. “But there was still a small problem as I had no documentation to prove that I was Peng Ming-min.”

“So the Swedish government ran ads across the country, calling on people to come identify me. Luckily, I had some friends there, so I was quickly identified as Peng Ming-min and granted asylum,” he said.

“It’s true that our democracy is the result of hard battles fought by our democracy pioneers, but we must not forget many of our friends in other countries who provided so much help to us and would never boast about what they’ve done,” he said.

Listen to the voice

Prosecutors abandon all sense of neutrality
　

By Chen San-Er 陳三兒
Sunday, Sep 21, 2008, Page 8

On Monday, eight prosecutors in charge of the investigation into former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) secret overseas accounts held a press conference in Taipei.

During the press conference, prosecutor Yueh Fang-ju (越方如) proclaimed that if they failed to solve the case, they would step down.

Yueh asked rhetorically: “If the case cannot be solved, how could we not be too ashamed to stay?”

Supreme Prosecutor Office’s Special Investigation Panel (SIP) spokesman Chen Yun-nan (陳雲南) echoed Yueh’s comments, saying that if the team failed to solve the case, then they would have to step down, too.

The problem with this is that prosecutors are civil officials, not political appointees.

They should handle cases in accordance with the law and make remarks and decisions based on the evidence associated with the case at hand — nothing more and nothing less.

The language used by the SIP prosecutors at the press conference makes it sound as if they were pan-blue politicians commencing a campaign of attack on Chen Shui-bian.

In addition, the SIP ignored Articles 2 and 154 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (刑事訴訟法).

Article 2 stipulates that “a public official who conducts proceedings on a criminal case shall give equal attention to circumstances favorable or unfavorable to an accused,” while Article 154 stipulates that “prior to final conviction through trial, an accused is presumed to be innocent.”

After President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his administration took office, Minister of Justice Wang Ching-feng (王清峰) made public remarks regarding the details of the case on a political talkshow as if she were a civil servant rather than an elected official.

Now the prosecutors in the ministry’s own probe into the case have made a public statement directly dealing with an ongoing investigation that they are participating in, using politically tainted language to say that they will step down if they cannot find evidence to prove the accused has committed the crimes that he is accused of.

Is that right and proper? Whatever happened to the independence of the judiciary? How can this state of affairs reflect well on the judiciary’s credibility?

The prosecutors on the SIP are coming across like political guns hired by the president in proclaiming that their careers will be staked on their ability to secure Chen Shui-bian’s conviction.

Because of this, it will be very difficult to guarantee that these people are not, in fact, thinking of advancing their careers as public officials and that they are prepared to abuse their powers to get the desired result.

It is also difficult to believe that these prosecutors can be neutral in this case.

If Chen Shui-bian were convicted, it is hard to see how the public would believe that it was on the basis of guilt rather than as a means for these prosecutors to further their personal interests.

With this fateful SIP press conference, the prosecuting panel’s neutrality went up in smoke.

To ensure public confidence in the judiciary, the eight prosecutors involved should resign from their posts immediately and withdraw completely from the investigation into Chen Shui-bian.

If they don’t do this, the Ministry of Justice should take the initiative and have them replaced.

Chen San-er is a lawyer and a former chairman of Amnesty International Taiwan.