The Presidential Office yesterday condemned the outbreak of violence at Wednesday’s pension protest and vowed to continue with its pension reform, while Premier William Lai (賴清德) said the Cabinet could lead legislative efforts to toughen the penalties for assaulting a police officer.
Violent lawbreakers do not represent the nation’s patriotic and loyal soldiers, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said on Wednesday on Facebook, hours after rioters assaulted and injured 68 police officers and 16 journalists at a protest staged by the military veterans’ group 800 Heroes.
“This administration will not bow down to violence and it will not budge from the path of reform. I ask the nation to stand with reform and take the administration’s side,” Tsai wrote.
Photo: Peter Lo, Taipei Times
Presidential Office spokesmen Alex Huang (黃重諺) and Sidney Lin (林鶴明) also discussed the protest yesterday on talk show host Clara Chou’s (周玉蔻) morning show on HitFM.
Tsai’s position is that random attacks on journalists and law enforcement officers should not and will not be tolerated, Huang said.
Tsai also believes it has become an imperative to contain the unrest and to prevent further disturbances, he said.
Chou asked if the protesters’ “contempt for the law” suggests that Tsai’s leadership is weak.
Taiwan is a law-abiding nation and the police cannot act indiscriminately in response to a such a situation, Lin said.
No other world leader has borne insults and personal attacks with more patience than Tsai, following the administration’s decision to pursue pension reform, Huang said.
“Pension reform is the right thing to do and there is no stopping us on this,” he said.
Separately yesterday, Lai told a Cabinet meeting that the administration “strongly condemns” the violent actions of the protesters, as well as their occupation of National Taiwan University Children’s Hospital, which infringed on the rights of patients.
Law and order will be maintained and violent lawbreakers will be brought to account, Lai told National Police Agency and Ministry of Justice officials at the meeting.
The Cabinet is considering introducing a bill that toughens the penalties for assaulting a police officer, Lai said, while expressing his support for the police officers and journalists who were attacked on Wednesday.
The administration’s pension reform scheme represents the best system for protecting the welfare of military veterans and the sustainability of the pension system so that it can provide for next generation of troops, he said.
The administration’s resolve is unshaken, as is its commitment to dialogue in good faith, he said.
In response to 800 Heroes spokesman Wu Sz-huai’s (吳斯懷) criticism that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government has used a double standard in its handling of the protesters on Wednesday and Sunflower movement campaigners who broke into the Executive Yuan compound in 2014, Executive Yuan spokesman Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇) said there was “a world of a difference” between the two events.
The Executive Yuan last year retracted the charges filed against Sunflower movement campaigners over the 2014 break-in, but Lai said that it was considering suing the protesters who attacked police officers on Wednesday, Wu said.
Sunflower campaigners did not attack journalists or police officers, nor did they try to snatch reporters’ cameras, Hsu said, adding that this alone showed the great difference between the two incidents.
Asked whether the protest should be deemed an act of “civil disobedience,” Hsu said that the question would best be answered by a court and although the protesters’ cause concerns the public interest, it also involves personal interests.
By contrast, there was no personal interest involved when Sunflower campaigners started their movement to protest the former administration’s handling of a review of the cross-strait service trade agreement, Hsu said.
Additional reporting by Chen Yu-fu, Sean Lin and CNA
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