As the first appointed executive director of the Cabinet's ad hoc Memorial Foundation of the 228 Incident (二二八事件紀念基金會) since the peaceful transfer of power in 2000, Lee Wang-tai (李旺臺) knows first-hand about the true feelings of the victims' families of the notorious incident.
Three or four times a week, Lee visits victims' families across the nation to show them how the DPP-led government identifies with their pain and how it cares about the loss of their loved ones.
"I feel like a nurse healing the wounds of the injured," said Lee sitting in his ninth-floor downtown Taipei office. "I remember vividly the frightening look on the face of one of the old ladies whom I visited in Tainan County. She thought I was someone from the Investigation Bureau or National Security Bureau to question her about the 228 Incident."
After he managed to gain her trust, the woman burst into tears and started to tell him how much she and her family had suffered over the years after the death of her husband, who was executed because of his involvement in community patrols.
"She and her family had literally lived an isolated life for more than half a decade because not a single member of her relatives dared to have any contact with her," Lee said. "In addition to the constant visits of the police and investigators, they were blacklisted and banned from going abroad or having any possible job promotion."
Mission of the foundation
Visiting victims' families is just part of the 16-member foundation's mission. Issuing compensation is another.
According to the statistics made available by the foundation, it has distributed over NT$6.6 billion to nearly 1,900 victims' families since its establishment in 1995.
As of July 29, the foundation has received 2,334 compensation claims, 1,892 of which have successfully been paid while 334 were denied because of insufficient evidence.
"The lack of official documents and eye witnesses has made the identification process difficult," Lee said. "Sometimes we have to turn down a claim just because one or two small pieces of evidence are missing, although we're 90 percent sure about the reliability of their stories."
According to Lee, about a quarter of the claims filed are denied because of insufficient evidence.
To help tackle the problem, President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) has asked the Cabinet's Research, Development and Evaluation Commission to establish a task force dedicated to collecting government documents from regional government offices.
With the some 60,000 government documents collected so far, the foundation has paid compensation to half of the victims' families whose claims had earlier been denied.
Nevertheless, there are a lot more people out there who are eligible for the claims but fail to file them.
"Some have emigrated to foreign countries and know nothing about the claims and others refuse to file the claims because they don't want to collect the money which they said is an exchange for the lives of their loved ones," he said.
The amount of compensation for a victim's family ranges between NT$6 million for a victim who is dead or missing and NT$600,000 for those receiving six months' imprisonment.
The application deadline is October this year.
Establishment of the foundation
When Lee Teng-hui (
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