Last week, the entire Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), including party heavyweights and local candidates, intensified their attacks against the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for its assets looted from the state coffers. The DPP clearly plans to utilize this issue in order to put the KMT on the defensive, analysts say, and thereby help ensure that the pan-green camp wins a legislative majority in December.
"Although we are confident about our stand on other issues, including the arms procurement bill and the March 19 Shooting Truth Investigation Special Committee Statute (三一九槍擊事件真調會條例), we find that people care a lot about the KMT's ill-gotten assets," said DPP Information and Culture Department Director Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦).
Cheng said that DPP polls showed that voters regarded the first two issues as wars of words between the pan-blue and pan-green camps, from which they feel distant. But the KMT assets issue hits a raw nerve, because the party has never tried to correct their past mistakes and has instead kept trying to cover them up, Cheng said.
"We found that voters were generally repulsed by the KMT's dishonesty," Cheng said. "Therefore, demanding that the KMT disgorge its ill-gotten gains will become our main campaign theme, and will also highlight the DPP's determination for reform."
Some high-level DPP campaign aides jokingly compared the KMT assets issue to a debit card and ATM machine it can use to steal votes from the pan-blue camp.
"If the KMT still brazenly holds on to the money and properties it stole from the country and refuses to return them, this issue will continue to be an ATM machine for the DPP to withdraw votes from the KMT," said DPP caucus whip Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯).
DPP Deputy Secretary-General Chung Chia-pin (鍾佳濱) said whenever elections came around, high-ranking KMT officials always vow that they will deal with the party assets issue, yet they never seem to get around to doing that after they're elected.
"It was the KMT who gave the DPP the pin number of this `debit card' and it was the KMT who broke its promises," Chung said. "The KMT has disarmed itself in these elections because of its dishonesty and greed."
In fact, long before Taiwan's first "rotation of political parties" in 2000, the KMT violated social justice, Chung said. However, compared with other newly democratic countries that passed power from authoritarian regimes to democratic government, Taiwan is one of the few countries that did not undergo the course of "transitional justice," said Peter Huang (黃文雄), an advisor to the president and former president of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights.
"The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial still stands there. Many people still worship Chiang's family and feel deep emotions whenever they recall them," Huang said.
According to the UN definition, transitional justice considers both judicial and nonjudicial responses to human rights crimes, which might include prosecuting individual perpetrators, offering reparations to victims of state-sponsored violence, establishing truth-seeking initiatives about past abuse and reforming institutions like the police and the courts.
"The KMT assets issue is also included in the concept of transitional justice," Chung said. The fact that Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) enthroned the Chiangs as the key promoters of Taiwan's democracy and said that the DPP raised the issue of the KMT's assets in order to sabotage the ethnic harmony were examples of how Taiwan has lacked transitional justice.
"From the perspectives of elections or justice, the KMT has to return money that does not belong to them and show sincerity on this issue if they do want to be recognized by the people of Taiwan," Chung said.
Kenting National Park service technician Yang Jien-fon (楊政峰) won a silver award in World Grand Prix Photography Awards Spring Season for his photograph of two male rat snakes intertwined in combat. Yang’s colleagues at Kenting National Park said he is a master of nature photography who has been held back by his job in civil service. The awards accept entries in all four seasons across six categories: architectural and urban photography, black-and-white and fine art photography, commercial and fashion photography, documentary and people photography, nature and experimental photography, and mobile photography. Awards are ranked according to scores and divided into platinum, gold and
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus yesterday said it opposes the introduction of migrant workers from India until a mechanism is in place to prevent workers from absconding. Minister of Labor Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) on Thursday told the Legislative Yuan that the first group of migrant workers from India could be introduced as early as this year, as part of a government program. The caucus’ opposition to the policy is based on the assessment that “the risk is too high,” KMT caucus secretary-general Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) said. Taiwan has a serious and long-standing problem of migrant workers absconding from their contracts, indicating that
SPACE VETERAN: Kjell N. Lindgren, who helps lead NASA’s human spaceflight missions, has been on two expeditions on the ISS and has spent 311 days in space Taiwan-born US astronaut Kjell N. Lindgren is to visit Taiwan to promote technological partnerships through one of the programs organized by the US for its 250th national anniversary. Lindgren would be in Taiwan from Tuesday to Saturday next week as part of the US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ US Speaker Program, organized to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) said in a statement yesterday. Lindgren plans to engage with key leaders across the nation “to advance cutting-edge technological partnerships and inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers,”
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