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Lu wants `whole truth' on Kaohsiung Incident

"It is our duty to understand the process of the event, including how the authorities made their decisions and who should be held responsible."

Annette Le, vice president

Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) yesterday urged the National Archives to continue collecting documents relating to the 1979 Kaohsiung Incident and encouraged the identification of the decision makers behind the crackdown.

"The national archive should launch another round of efforts to collect other documents relating to this incident to demonstrate the whole truth," Lu said.

"The purpose is not to wreak revenge but to face history honestly," Lu said.

The Kaohsiung Incident was a crackdown on a human rights march in Kaohsiung, after which prominent democracy activists -- who would later become senior figures in the DPP -- were rounded up and imprisoned.

Lu made her remarks while viewing an exhibition at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall featuring declassified documents regarding the incident. The exhibition opened on Feb. 28, the 56th anniversary of the 228 Incident.

Lu urged the government to establish the truth of the 228 Incident, in which the former KMT government launched a nation-wide crackdown on civil unrest in 1947. Resentment among the Taiwanese came to a head as citizens expressed their frustration at the corruption and incompetence of the recently arrived regime.

"President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and I were both key people in the Kaohsiung Incident and now we serve as state leaders," Lu said. "It will be a great irony and pity if we still avoid facing the historical truth."

"We don't want to retaliate against any particular person," she said, "but it is our duty to understand the process of the event, including how the authorities made their decisions and who should be held responsible."

Chen was a defense lawyer for some of the activists arrested in Kaohsiung, who became known as the Kaohsiung Eight.

Noting that she and the president both advocate a "human- rights-oriented state," Lu said that the whole truth of both incidents should be revealed and not partially or selectively published.

"What I am concerned about now is that many crucial materials held by the private sector or the government's secret service have been destroyed," she said.

Commenting on PFP Chairman James Soong's (宋楚瑜) role in the aftermath of the Kaohsiung Incident, Lu said that the fact that Soong -- in his capacity as director-general of the Government Information Office at the time -- deported a reporter for the Associated Press, whose story on the incident had been cited by local media, proved that he had restricted freedom of speech.

"As a spokesman for an authoritarian government, Soong's job was to cover up the government's mistakes," Lu said.

"May God help him to turn over a new leaf," she said.

Asked whether it was appropriate that the exhibition displayed a confession she had written under duress, Lu said that many of the people involved in the incident had written confessions under extreme pressure and the display was not fair.

"Before the military trial formally opened, the authorities had already written the whole script," Lu said, "and none of those people wrote their confessions of their own free will."

"They would have suffered terrible treatment if they had refused to follow the authorities' orders," Lu said, "and though I wasn't physically tortured for my confession, I suffered mental torture in total darkness for three months."
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