Editorial: Ma Ying-jeou's moment of truth

For years, an allegation has circulated that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) served as a KMT spy while studying law at Harvard University.

Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮), Environmental Protection Agency Minister Winston Dang (陳重信) and Lee Tun-hou (李敦厚), professor of virology at the Harvard School of Public Health's Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, are among the Taiwanese Harvard alumni who have at one time or another publicly accused Ma of being a "professional student" -- a euphemism for a KMT informer. The charge is that Ma, under the guise of writing for the KMT-affiliated Boston Periodical, monitored and reported on overseas Taiwanese students who took part in anti-government protests and demonstrations.

As absurd as it might sound, under the rule of presidents Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), overseas Taiwanese needed to apply for visas to return to their country. Thus, anyone who had been blacklisted -- perhaps as a result of information supplied by student informants -- found that he or she was unable to return, which resulted in considerable suffering.

As a result of a defamation lawsuit filed by Ma on Tuesday against Government Information Office Minister Shieh Jhy-wey (謝志偉), a court will eventually rule on whether or not the KMT presidential candidate served as a spy during his time at Harvard.

But given that Ma could be elected president next year, he has a responsibility to come clean on the subject now. Why wait for the result of litigation that could drag on for a long time when a statement for the record could put his supporters at ease?

This country's democracy was made possible by the sacrifices of countless people, including the many courageous overseas students who braved the watchful gaze of "professional students" to take part in protests against the authoritarian KMT regime.

This resulted not only in students being banned from returning, but also in mysterious disappearances. Worse still, there are cases such as Carnegie Mellon University professor Chen Wen-chen (陳文成). An active participant in Taiwanese independence protests, Chen was taken away by security forces and found dead on the lawn of National Taiwan University on July 2, 1981 -- just one day after returning to Taiwan to visit his family.

At the time, the KMT government claimed Chen had committed suicide. A Carnegie Mellon team, however, concluded that the professor had been murdered.

Given the extent of the suffering caused by the KMT's student informers, the public has the right to know if Ma was one of them. Where there is smoke, there is sometimes fire, and this haze has lingered for years. It's time to resolve the matter based on material evidence and sworn testimony.