Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) said yesterday he would not commit suicide like former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun because he wanted to live to see his enemies punished.
Kaohsiung City Councilor Huang Chao-hsing (黃昭星) yesterday visited Chen at the Taipei Detention Center. After the visit, Huang told reporters that Chen said he would not follow the path of the former South Korean president.
The news of Roh’s death on Saturday has been met with concern in Taiwan that Chen might also contemplate suicide. Roh and Chen are similar in many ways. They are both former presidents who built their reputation as clean politicians fighting government corruption, only to have their reputations tainted by graft charges.
Huang said Chen’s wife, Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍), who has had health problems since she was run over by a truck in 1985 — leaving her paralyzed — had told the former president that she would live to see him come out from behind bars.
Huang said Chen told him he would maintain a relaxed attitude and come out of jail alive, and that he would not fall into the trap set by people who wanted to see him dead, Huang added.
Chen has been held at the Taipei Detention Center since Dec. 30 on charges including money laundering, embezzlement and corruption.
He was indicted on Dec. 12 and charged with illegally receiving or embezzling NT$490 million (US$15 million). He has repeatedly denied the charges and has denounced his trial as political persecution.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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