Editorial: No way to treat protesters

Last week was a black one for Taiwan. First there were the mass executions on Wednesday night of eight men who, while almost certainly guilty of the crimes they were supposed to have committed, nevertheless were prosecuted, convicted and given mandatory death sentences under a law which many legal experts believe to be invalid. A knee in the groin of due process, then.

And then we were treated to the spectacle on Saturday, the eve of National Day, of riot police laying into earthquake victims who had had the temerity to gather outside the Presidential Office, seeking to talk to President Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) about problems with the government's quake relief and rebuilding policies, without the required police permit. So, a good poke in the eye of civil liberties as well.

The protesters outside the Presidential Office did obtain a permit, of course. They were far too law-abiding to presume that they had the right to assemble any time, any place to sound off about their grievances. But the permit was, in a masterly piece of insensitivity, cancelled by the Taipei City Police, virtually as the buses from central Taiwan were leaving to bring the protesters north.

The reason for the cancellation, according to the police, was that as Lee had gone to central Taiwan on Saturday morning to answer people's complaints in Taichung County's Tali, there was no need for the demonstrators to come north. If this wasn't patronizing enough, the quake victims were then told by the deputy director of Taipei City Police Department's Chungshan branch that they should spend their time more usefully in rebuilding their homes -- as if finding the money and land with which to do this was not a large part of their problems.

The president seemed to acquit himself well enough at the Tali meeting. Given that previous visits to central Taiwan by Lee had resulted in his helicopter blowing down survivors' tents and a tree, in the process killing a small girl, things could only get better. In Taipei, however, Lee's office bungled badly by failing to send out anyone more senior than a low-ranking functionary to meet the protesters. And then, as if to pour salt on the wound, the police responded to the protesters' request that they also meet with Academia Sinica President Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠晢) by saying that they didn't know his phone number. Really, this is beneath contempt.

Of course, one could be forgiven for expecting such PR blunders by the government. Yet one of the most peculiar things about Saturday's events is how lacking in sympathy everybody else has been. There seems to have been almost an editorial conspiracy of silence on these disgusting events, as if the demonstrators were really in the wrong to have the temerity to voice their grievances on National Day. Apparently, the government and its media toadies think that reverencing an event that happened to other people somewhere else -- which is what Double Ten National Day commemorates -- is more important than paying attention to the problems of the victims of the worst natural disaster in Taiwan for 70 years. Indeed, while central Taiwan's citizens were trying to dry out their tents from the weekend rain, foreign minister Jason Hu was defending government largess to the Marshall Islands and especially Kosovo, saying that "we can't let the quake shake our diplomacy." Which makes this newspaper ask, in the spirit of Jonathan Swift, whether emigrating to either of these localities might be the quickest way for Taiwanese to obtain help from their own government.