The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government should step up its efforts to relieve Aborigines’ apprehension over why the party’s draft legislation on transitional justice fails to address Aboriginal issues, to prevent the bill from being foiled by unnecessary infighting between potential allies.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) is to officially and publicly apologize to Aboriginal groups on Aug. 1, the nation’s Aboriginal Day. While this has been praised as a historic and symbolic move, many young Aborigines say it would be an empty gesture if the DPP bill does not extend to the injustices suffered by Aboriginal groups over the loss of their land and culture over more than 100 years.
The criticism has not only come from young Aborigines. The New Power Party has slammed the DPP government for “overlooking” Aboriginal rights, and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus — especially its Aboriginal lawmakers — has been tearing into the DPP for dealing with only “a minority of people’s” grievances to serve the DPP’s ends.
Transitional justice needs to be addressed. What the DPP government, or the DPP caucus for that matter, has failed to do is explain to the public — especially the Aboriginal population — why legislation on dealing with injustices perpetrated during the authoritarian era, which affected the general population, should be separate from one dealing specifically with Aboriginal justice.
Non-Partisan Solidarity Union Legislator May Chin (高金素梅), an Atayal, has claimed that the bill only seeks justice for a “minority of people” whose rights had been trampled upon during the Martial Law era and needed to be reinstated.
It is a myth that only a certain group of people, or a certain ethnic group, were subjected to arbitrary arrest and execution and various human rights violations during the KMT regime’s authoritarian rule.
The so-called waishengren (外省人, Mainlanders) group also suffered during the White Terror era. Considering their relatively smaller population, the number of waishengren political victims was disproportionately high. Aborigines were not exempted from the terror either.
Losin Watan — the Atayal leader whom Chin mentioned in her call for Aboriginal land justice at a legislative meeting — was a prominent example. He was accused of being a communist spy attempting to overthrow the government and executed — the same charges that visited anyone suspected of being, or potentially being, anti-KMT.
The White Terror era intruded into every aspect of people’s lives; it affected the whole of society and a whole generation’s mentality, even though only a small proportion of the population were incarcerated, tortured and killed.
The worries of waishengren, many of whom have been misled by the KMT into believing that any action against the past KMT authoritarian regime is tantamount to targeting them, have been aggravated by a recent incident involving a self-styled citizen reporter, Hung Su-chu (洪素珠). Hung posted videos of her berating some elderly veterans who came to Taiwan with the KMT regime in 1949. Several KMT politicians have not hesitated to cash in on the absurdity of a political outlier and ramp up these fears.
The Aborigines’ concern that their demand for transitional justice might be neglected is undertandable, as they probably believe — not without grounds for suspicion — that the DPP has less political motivation to carry the torch for them.
The DPP government has to make the public understand that the perpetrators who are to be held accountable are not coterminous with any particular ethnic group. If the DPP decides not to include Aborigines’ demand in the existing bill on transitional justice, it has to convince Aboriginal groups — supported by concrete measures — that it is putting equal effort into establishing another framework for transitional justice for them and that pushing for two separate bills would produce a better outcome.
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