While dealing with the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) ill-gotten party assets is an indispensable aspect of transitional justice, President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration should not let it become the primary task, as that would substantiate the opposition’s accusation that the drive is a fig leaf for a political vendetta.
The Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee has, since its establishment, flexed its muscles, stripping questionable assets from the KMT that emerged from the one-party state era.
Following the freezing of the KMT’s bank accounts and the demand that its stakes in two investment companies be transferred to the state, the committee is now poised to investigate the National Women’s League.
Critics say the league is a KMT-affiliated organization that solicited donations worth tens of billions of New Taiwan dollars for military veterans between 1955 and 1989.
The Ministry of the Interior on Tuesday said that in the past the league has refused requests to submit financial statements eight times.
There is no doubt that Taiwanese politics has long needed a deep cleansing, and addressing the fortune that the KMT amassed during the authoritarian era, which gave it an unfair advantage in politics and business, is important, but the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) knows well that transitional justice is far more than that.
Official documents and files related to acts of political persecution have not been collected and organized, and Article 9 of the National Security Act (國家安全法), which denies people convicted by a military court of crimes relating to national security during the White Terror era the right to appeal or request a retrial, is still on the books. The “transitional justice promotion committee” under the Executive Yuan that the president promised to establish to oversee the completion of the nation’s transitional justice is nowhere to be seen.
The draft bill on transitional justice promotion, which if passed would provide the legal standing for the transitional justice committee, was tabled by the New Power Party (NPP) caucus to be heard on the floor of the legislature. Unexpectedly, it was the DPP caucus that blocked the motion, claiming the “timing” was not yet “right.” The bill passed the committee review in June, but has since been mothballed.
The stalled legislation would have little substantial effect anyway, as even without it, the assets settlement committee has been established, a separate bill for sorting political archives is being mulled in the legislature and the Ministry of Culture has taken on the task of establishing a national human rights museum and a nationwide network of “sites of conscience.”
It is also true that from the beginning, some academics disapproved of this “framework” legislation for promoting transitional justice, calling it unnecessary.
However, as the DPP believed it was necessary to propose such a bill, one has to question why the timing is not yet “right” for its passage. Some DPP lawmakers reportedly said it was because the administration could not afford to “open another battlefront,” considering how hard-pressed it already is dealing with a litany of controversial issues.
One wonders who is at fault for the multitude of muddy battlefronts. Tsai’s administration has not demonstrated executive authority in achieving its policy objectives, as evidenced by the labor law flip-flop, the furor over the planned import of food products from five Japanese prefectures or the protests over same-sex marriage — and it largely has only itself to blame.
There would be nowhere to hide if her government also fudged the task of transitional justice.
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