Nonetheless, when the Presidential Office late last week extended an invitation to the students to meet with Chen on Monday, April 12, the invitation was turned down.
"According to international cases, our appeals should be addressed after six days of a hunger strike," said student spokesperson Chen Cheng-feng (陳政峰). He might want to check his facts.
Advocates of "tax honesty" in the US have previously gone on hunger strike with little or no acknowledgement from the government or media. Members of the Irish Republican Army went on hunger strike in 1981 demanding to be accorded political prisoner status. By mid-August of that year, 10 men had starved themselves to death, each of them languishing for as much as two months. Their demands were never met.
Hunger strikers who have their requests addressed within a week are the exception, not the rule. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, most hunger strikers go longer than a week before even receiving medical attention. Not so with the students at the memorial hall, who are being attended to by on-site medical
personnel.
One of the core group of protesters whose commitment those paramedics were taking seriously was Chen Hsin-ju (陳信儒), who claimed on Thursday afternoon to have gone without food since April 2 and without water for the past two days.
Asked by the Taipei Times how he was feeling, Chen nodded affirmatively. Asked how long he would continue if their demands were not met, he said nothing. Twenty minutes later he fainted and was sent by ambulance to Taiwan University Hospital. A clerk in the emergency ward said Chen had checked out at 7pm that same evening. He returned to the memorial hall briefly the next morning to offer support to his classmates.
The students say their ultimate goal is to force a groundswell of popular support. But there are indications that their efforts may be achieving the opposite result. A look at Internet chat rooms shows they may have more detractors than supporters. Rather than gaining in importance, the story is moving back in the pages of the daily
newspapers.
"I don't think they know what they're doing," said one passerby. "Everyone wants to know about the shooting, but you have to wait for the investigation. ... I think they just want attention."
They're getting it in spades from family and friends and the dozens of sympathetic supporters who have come out to the memorial hall to keep vigil.
"Oh, how pitiful!" said one of these woman as Chen Hsin-ju went to hospital.
She's right, he's missing out on some good sausages.
RSS