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Stand up for your democracy: protesters
ACTION STATIONS: Taiwanese protesting the service trade pact must show today that they are not a minority, but deeply worried about their country, protesters said
By Alison Hsiao / Staff reporter
Protesters occupying the legislative chamber watch President Ma Ying-jeou’s press conference at the Presidential Office to address the protesters’ demands yesterday.
Photo: CNA
All members of the public around the nation have to stand up today for their democratic rights and the survival of their hard-won democracy, the student protesters occupying the legislative chamber in protest against the government’s handling of the cross-strait service trade pact said yesterday.
Joined by scores of representatives of non-governmental organizations, the protesters told a press conference yesterday morning that the rally today in Taipei would be a non-violent one and cautioned the police against going overboard in their law enforcement efforts.
As the students’ occupation of the Legislative Yuan continued into the 12th day, “the government is still ignoring our demand for the institutionalization of a cross-strait agreement oversight mechanism and responding by besmirching our cause and talking nonsense,” the students and civil groups said.
“We will show through the 3/30 Ketagalan Boulevard demonstration that we are not a minority and not a violent mob, but a group of citizens who are deeply worried about our country’s crisis of constitutionalism,” the protesters said in a statement.
The anti-“black-box” service trade pact movement has been followed and echoed by overseas Taiwanese too, they said.
The students also announced that they have established an internal deliberative mechanism to counteract and respond to the government’s future calls for communication, be they private or public.
The announcement was made in response to a hullabaloo caused by a supposedly personal meeting between one of the movement’s leaders, Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica, and Presidential Office Deputy Secretary-General Hsiao Hsu-tsen (蕭旭岑) on Friday.
The meeting, after it was exposed, raised doubts about the secrecy of the unauthorized talk, which other student leaders did not know about.
Calling for an end to the authorities’ “private calls and unofficial release of information, and probing and dividing tactics,” civil groups and student representatives have achieved a consensus over the building up of an internal democratic decisionmaking mechanism to counteract the Presidential Office’s “off-the-record actions,” one of the student group’s representatives said.
The student leaders also responded to questions from the media about a possible communication between the students and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷), one of the student leaders, said that during the previous discussion about the possible meeting, “we had lost our trust in the Ma administration.”
“We are asking Ma not to use party discipline to restrain his party’s [Chinese Nationalist Party – KMT] legislators’ reaction to the proposal of the institutionalization of a mechanism for overseeing cross-strait agreements,” Chen said. “If he cannot promise this, where is the room for discussion?”
Chen, responding to Ma’s press conference last night, said Ma was “repeating himself.”
“What the president proposed was only allowing us to take a look at the pact, but not to review it in substantial terms [with the possibility of changing the clauses],” he said.
“What we are asking is to legislate first [for a cross-strait agreement oversight act] before reviewing the pact, but President Ma said the two can take place simultaneously. This will only repeat the history of KMT Legislator Chang Ching-chung’s (張慶忠) 30-second ramming-through [of the pact in the Executive Yuan],” he added.
“What we mean by ‘the retraction of the CSSTA’ [cross-strait service trade agreement] is to have the pact sent back to the Executive Yuan and make room for a citizens’ constitutional conference to participate in the reviewing process,” Chen said.
source: Taipei Times
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