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Ma's brazen attack on Taiwan's democracy

Anyone without a deeper understanding of the political situation in Taiwan would be excused for thinking that President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) must have violated a slew of laws to cause the pan-blue camp to call for his blood and launch a formal motion for his recall. Even Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said, mouth dripping with venom, that unless Chen steps down, the people will rise up and topple him, giving him a nasty death.

"Topple" and "die a nasty death" are phrases implying violence and coups d'etat that make us think of China's Cultural Revolution, a time when the air was filled with shouts of "topple" and people were driven to "nasty deaths" on a daily basis.

When Ma gave his reasons for supporting the recall motion, he inadvertently told us the truth. He said that the motion to recall Chen was a "political action" and that "a violation of the law is not necessary" to support such a move. In the midst of the barrage of pan-blue accusations against Chen, this was tantamount to telling the world that Chen had not violated the law and that he was not involved in the corruption scandals; that these accusations, in effect, were political fabrications without any foundation in fact.

That is the only reason why Ma, a former minister of justice with a law degree, said that "a violation of the law is not necessary," since that washes Chen clean of all criminal suspicions.

From another point of view, this statement is a shameless attack on Taiwan's democracy. In Western democracies, there is no way to recall a head of state based on political actions. One of the core values of democracy is the adherence to the rule of law.

The House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee voted for three articles of impeachment against US president Richard Nixon, including obstruction of justice. The full House voted to impeach US president Bill Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice.

In the end, Nixon resigned because he lacked the support in the House or Senate to survive an impeachment vote. Clinton escaped being impeached by the Senate because some Republicans crossed party lines to vote against his impeachment out of concern for the overall situation. Had the Republican majority in the Senate voted strictly along party lines -- as is likely to happen in Taiwan -- Clinton would have had to step down and the US would have seen an end to its normal two-party political system.

The Democrats are hoping that President George W. Bush will step down, but they are looking for examples of his breaking the law. They are trying, for example, to prove that his orders to bug overseas telephone calls to the US were illegal. They are not trying to impeach him because of his political actions, such as the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

If it were possible to recall the head of state in two-party or multi-party systems for their political actions, political views and policy differences would turn democracy into a farce where parties would take turns recalling each other's head of state -- a preposterous, unimaginable situation.

Such a preposterous and unimaginable situation is currently being played out in Taiwan. The biggest opposition party has held a demonstration to incite the public, and its chairman has even said that "a violation of the law is not necessary" to recall the president, his political actions are enough.

By using his status as chairman of an opposition party to say that Chen has broken no laws, Ma has proven that his standards are lower than anyone had ever expected.

Cao Changqing is a Chinese dissident writer based in the US.

Translated by Perry Svensson
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