|
Too little done for
victims of White Terror: activists
By Chris Wang / Staff Reporter
The government has done too little for victims of the White Terror era and
Taiwanese tend to forget about what their forebears had to sacrifice for
democracy, academics and former political prisoners said yesterday.
The government should establish a task force to explore, collect and manage
information on all political cases during the White Terror era, the group said
at a press conference announcing the launch of an online database of political
prisoners and victims from 1945 to 1987.
The White Terror era began after the 228 Incident, when the Chinese Nationalist
Party (KMT) government launched a brutal military crackdown against people
protesting the administration of then-executive administrator Chen Yi (陳儀).
During the White Terror era, the KMT government killed tens of thousands of
suspected dissidents, many intellectuals and members of the social elite.
Chang Mao-hsiung (張茂雄), 72, a former political prisoner, said that as of now,
efforts by the government to explore and document details of that tragic period
have been lacking.
Chang, who spent five years behind bars as a prisoner of conscience, has devoted
15 years of his life to building up a database of political cases during the
White Terror era. So far, he has catalogued 12,541 persons and 3,250 cases, but
these only represent a small portion and more effort is needed before the public
can gain more insight into a tragic chapter of the nation’s past, he said.
Wang Hsiao-po (王曉波), a professor at National Taiwan University, who hosted the
press conference, said Chang’s database and the false impression that it was
Mainlanders who oppressed Taiwanese showed how little is understood about the
White Terror era.
Mainlanders, 15 percent of Taiwan’s population, accounted for 41 percent of all
political cases in the White Terror period, Wang said.
“That tells you Mainlanders were the victims as well,” said Wang, a
pro-unification advocate. “In fact, everyone in Taiwan was a victim during those
days.”
There would be no reconciliation if the truth is not revealed, Democratic
Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇) said.
“Taiwan has been a divided country in terms of national identity and emotion,
because everyone looks at the past through their own eyes, as we don’t know much
of the truth about the past,” she said.
Citing the example of South Africa, which established a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission after the end of apartheid, Wu Nai-teh (吳乃德), a researcher at
Academia Sinica, said he “often wondered why a rich and mature society such as
Taiwan does not care about such values” because many poorer and less-developed
countries had set up similar institutions to deal with issues from the past.
A large number of White Terror era files are kept in the National Archive, Wu
said, but accessibility has been highly limited, showing that the government is
still worried about making the files public.
Former DPP chairperson Shih Ming-teh (施明德), also a former political prisoner,
said that if there was no evidence being documented, the government would be
able to make up stories about the past and distort history.
“We can’t let that happen again,” he said.
|
