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Ma defends Soong visiting Kaohsiung Incident exhibition

Taipei City Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday came to PFP Chairman James Soong's (宋楚瑜) defense with regard to his role in the 1979 Kaohsiung Incident, saying Soong was not to be held accountable for control measures that were used on activists during an anti-government riot.

"When the Kaohsiung Incident broke out, Soong was the GIO's director-general, and therefore was not directly involved in handling it," Ma said.

The GIO was the mouthpiece for the KMT government, which was enforcing martial-law rule at the time.

Ma made the remarks yesterday during a visit to the exhibition on the declassified official documents of the Kaohsiung Incident at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei.

The mayor also recognized the need to declassify Kaohsiung Incident documents, but stressed the importance of recognizing them as historical records, not instruments for immediate political gain.

"Work done in an administrative capacity can not be used to gain favor in an election; that's why we have to remain impartial as administrators," Ma said, adding that this impartiality does apply to documentation alone, but also to day-to-day administration. Persons, affairs and facilities, can not be used as election campaign tools, he said.

As he viewed the materials, Ma stressed that records of written or oral confessions should be taken with a grain of salt and that it is the duty of experts and academics to unearth the truth behind what happened on that day.

Asked why he chose to visit this particular exhibition, Ma said he came to gain further understanding of the incident, which broke out at a time when he was still studying in the US, and to access documents which had been unavailable.

The Kaohsiung Incident occurred Dec. 10, 1979, during which many dissidents were imprisoned and forced to make confessions. Many of the dissidents joined the pan-green camp.
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