An historic reunion occurred earlier this month in a very small Asian country that is playing a very large role on the geopolitical stage right now.
The Taiwan Foundation for Democracy invited 30 foreign human rights activists, myself among them, to return to Taiwan so we could be honored for our contributions to democracy and independence.
Our host for the week-long event was President Chen Shui-Bian (
Taiwan's democracy was brought about by voting, not by violence.
Many of today's governmental leaders are former political prisoners and human rights activists who were personally involved with the missionaries and scholars in our group.
They hosted us as we traveled around Taiwan telling our individual stories and being welcomed by thousands of people and government leaders.
On Dec. 10, 2003, the anniversary of the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we were gathered in the Chapel at Tainan Presbyterian Seminary in southern Taiwan where we reminisced about the importance of missionaries in helping people oppose the abuses of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
At the end of that session, and without anyone having planned it, we began to sing We Shall Overcome.
From the 1950s to the 1980s, we had all played a role in the underground pro-democracy movement in Taiwan.
While the US was reeling from the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and college students were staging a national strike and cities were burning, Chiang Kai-shek (
High-profile cases of torture, imprisonment and assassination were coupled with daily indignities of information control, language suppression and corruption at all levels of government.
Because of the kind of work we did, many in our group of foreign human rights activists were deported or blacklisted by the Taiwanese government.
Among them were the Methodist missionary couple Mike and Judy Thornberry. With a small group of other foreign clergy and scholars, they helped Peng Ming-min (
Peng was the most famous political opposition leader in Taiwan at that time.
A native Taiwanese, he had studied law in Japan and France. In the early 1960s he wrote a manifesto calling for the independence of Taiwan. In Peng's view, Taiwan should be independent of Chinese rule, and should establish a democratic state.
Chiang's government charged him with sedition and put him under house arrest. In the late 1960s it appeared that he might be secretly executed.
The Thornberrys and their friends decided to send Peng secretly out of the country to save his life.
In 1971, they devised a plan to forge a passport, create a disguise and place him on a commercial plane through Hong Kong to Sweden. The success of this plan was met with fury. The Thornberrys were placed under house arrest and then deported.
Taiwanese government officials claimed that the US Central Intelligence Agency had been behind the plan, and their claims fomented significant anti-US sentiment in Taiwan.
Ironically, the US government seized Mike Thornberry's passport, preventing him from leaving the US for many decades and keeping him under surveillance.
After martial law was repealed in 1987, Peng returned to Taiwan and ran unsuccessfully for the presidency. He is still tremendously popular.
The reunion with his accomplices, including me, was the first time we had met in Taiwan for over 30 years.
The singing of We Shall Overcome was not a celebration of a final victory. All of us old and loyal friends of the Taiwanese people are thankful that martial law has disappeared and that Taiwan is known as a leader in human rights in Asia.
There are still human rights problems to resolve, such as issues of labor, women, migrant workers and cultural freedom, but Taiwan today has no political prisoners and is ruled by law.
An immense human rights problem confronts Taiwan right now, and it is not coming from within.
The problem is the Chinese threat to destroy Taiwan's cultural and political identity by seizing control of the nation by military force. Chen has reacted to this threat by calling for a referendum that would call on China to remove the 500 missiles it has aimed at Taiwan and demand that China cease threatening Taiwan with force. The US opposes the referendum.
Those of us who sang the anthem of the civil rights movement in a Taiwan church on Dec. 10 know that in order to keep moving in the direction that democracy takes us, we need to keep telling our stories, keep speaking truth to power.
Will there be a new generation of human rights activists who will help tip the scale in favor of Taiwan?
I'm working on it.
Richard C. Kagan is a history professor at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
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