NSC continues to cast long shadow

"If the NSC is a policy-making organ for the president, both the Executive Yuan and the legislature must be downgraded as a result," Tang admitted.

"But once a meeting of the NSC is called by the president, it turns into an emergency-handling mechanism. It will provide policy-making suggestions to the president as the basis for him to make the final decision," he said.

His explanation drew a measure of skepticism in response from Su and other well-known academics.

"From a legal perspective, the NSC is more than a consulting agency. Its role and function tend to change with its leadership. In other words, the agency is quite subject to human influences," Su said.

"When the NSC was under the rule of Ting Mao-shih (?B懋時), it put more emphasis on expanding and enhancing relations with the US," Su said. "This was initially not one of the tasks of the council. It became one only because Ting, a former representative to the US, was more capable in dealing with Taiwan-US relations.

"Now, with Yin Chung-wen (殷宗??/CHINESE>) at the helm, the NSC generally takes more aggressive initiatives and has demonstrated a stronger desire to be more of a player," Su said.

Naturally, there needs to be some clout to go behind the pursuit of such objectives. "Authorization from President Lee Teng-hui is apparently behind it," Su said.

A clear sign of the council's re-emergence as a policy-making power was the controversy generated by President Lee's pledge of US$300 million in financial aid to Kosovo, analysts say.

Others say that Lee's "special state-to-state relations" statement in July, which so enraged China and shook up relations with Washington as well, bore all the hallmarks of the NSC's growing influence under Yin.

Indeed, the NSC's scope has broadened under Yin's leadership, covering even Taiwan's bid to enter the WTO, several analysts said.

Whether this will continue, however, is uncertain, as Yin, a retired army general, has been hospitalized since August for lung cancer treatment. His prede-cessor, Ting, has retaken his post temporarily.

It is also doubtful whether the NSC has much capacity for further wide-ranging work as it lacks personnel who are up to the task, analysts said. The council has only five full-time officials, who do not have a large research staff at their disposal. Other employees serve mostly administrative functions.

Given these circumstances, it is doubtful whether the NSC can fulfill one of its most important functions -- to provide crucial advice to the president so that he can decide whether to declare war, the analysts said.

One military analyst, who declined to be identified, said the dubious role of the NSC cannot be settled unless greater constitutional clarity is brought to the debate over whether the country is actually run by the president or the premier.

If the president is clearly defined as the head of the government, the role of the NSC will become less controversial, the analyst said, but if the premier is supposed to be the chief executive, disputes will naturally arise over whether the Executive Yuan should take instructions from the NSC or the opposite.

Under the present Constitu-tion, the Premier is appointed by the President, but he can be unseated by a no-confidence motion in the legislature.