Tue, May 06, 2014 page8

• EDITORIAL: Sunday’s rallies missed the point

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  The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the New Party held separate rallies on Sunday with similar themes, the former calling for social stability and support for the police and the latter championing the rule of law.

  Organizers and participants argued that the protests of the past months, including the Sunflower movement, the various “occupation” and “passing-by” campaigns targeting different government agencies and the Legislative Yuan siege, were illegal and lacked respect for the rule of law.

  They said that the street protests had not only jeopardized social stability and harmony but also disrupted people’s lives by paralyzing traffic and mass transit systems, while many shops were unable to open.

  In the New Party rally, participants waved the national flag and chanted “I love the Republic of China (ROC).” The actions of some student protesters in the Sunflower movement who hung the national flag upside down and publicly voiced support for Taiwanese independence were unpatriotic and unacceptable, they said, adding that student leaders Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) and Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷) were “Fascists.”

  Intriguingly, the KMT rally became a mass campaign for former Taipei EasyCard Corp chairman Sean Lien (連勝文), the KMT’s candidate for the Taipei mayoral election, with Lien urging supporters to use their votes to “teach those who attempted to challenge ‘the system’ a lesson” in the year-end elections.

  The themes, causes and arguments of the rallies have completely missed the point.

  First, the protesters, like President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration, have failed — or refused to understand the root cause of the intensifying spirit underpinning the movement.

  The reason protesters resorted to the extremes of occupying the legislature, organizing a siege of a police precinct station and blocking lawmakers from leaving the legislative compound — all forms of civil disobedience — was that they had exhausted all possiblities within “the system” and did not get adequate responses from the government.

  By definition, civil disobedience is a refusal to obey certain laws with the awareness that the actions are illegal and are subject to punishment, including prison terms and fines. The disobedience would not be justifiable if it were not staged for a higher cause than opposition to the government.

  So far the protests have been able to focus on the unconstitutional actions of the Ma administration, such as its failure to respect legislative supervision and the separation of powers, its excessive use of state force, its distortion of the rule of law, its ignorance of national security in engagement with China and the handling of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮).

  With the Constitution being the fundamental law of the country, the constitutional order should also be on a higher echelon than social order.

  While the clash between the protesters and the police was unfortunate, it was the Ma administration’s failure to respond to the public which necessitated the formation of these social movements. Additionally, resentment of the police was aimed at those who used excessive force against the protesters rather than the entire police force. The National Police Agency’s inaction against those officers who overused batons only exacerbated the situation.

  National identity was not the central theme of recent social movements despite the undertone of anti-China sentiment and even though protesters did mention support for independence and raise the national flag upside down as a symbol of a “nation in crisis.”

  Wrong interpretation of the movement shows the disconnection between the pan-blue camp and Taiwanese. The most frightening scenario would be if the pan-blue camp did understand what the social movement is all about yet deliberately made it a partisan issue for the benefit of future elections.
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