Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday expressed support for Miaoli County farmers caught up in a land dispute with the county government.
Visiting the area with party officials and DPP lawmakers, she said the Miaoli County Government’s land expropriation program violated the basic human rights of farmers that were forced out of their homes.
The government has expropriated 28 hectares in Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, for an expansion of the Jhunan Science Park. The move has attracted a storm of controversy after a number of farmers refused to turn over their land, saying they had lived in the area for decades.
Large technology companies, including Chimei Innolux Corp, the nation’s biggest LCD panel maker, reportedly expressed an interest in building new factories on the land.
“President Ma Ying-jeou’s [馬英九] government has given free rein for county commissioners and large corporations to engage in reckless behavior,” Tsai said. “I’m worried that more incidents like this will continue happening in the future.”
She said it was regrettable that neither Ma nor the central government had stepped in and taken control of the situation, despite numerous protests by area farmers.
On June 30, more than 100 residents from Jhunan Township demonstrated against the Executive Yuan and the Presidential Office, with some saying they would not know how to make a living if the county government expropriated their land.
Two days prior to the protests, a large number of rice paddies were dug up by excavators deployed by the county government, a move that the county government has defended as “completely legal.”
Media reports quoted Liu as saying yesterday that the entire seven-year land expropriation and development proposal had followed procedure and was done in accordance with law.
He said that 98 percent of landowners had agreed to the expropriation measures and that the county government had already completed the legal process for taking over the land.
Liu also criticized Tsai, saying that her involvement in the affair was a political stunt to increase support for the year-end special municipality elections and amounted to “political interference.”
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