President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday expressed his condolences to victims of the White Terror era at a memorial in front of the Presidential Office.
The event, called “Love and Hope,” marked the 23rd anniversary since the lifting of Martial Law, a period during which thousands of people in Taiwan were subjected to purges, imprisonment, executions and repression by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
Addressing hundreds of people who gathered for the event, Ma apologized on behalf of the KMT and offered his condolences to the victims and their families.
PHOTO: LO PEI-DER, TAIPEI TIMES
“Those who were wrongly accused of crimes they were not guilty of suffered and sacrificed their health and reputation,” he said.
“For many years, [the victims] could not lead normal lives … As the government, we should admit our wrongdoings and express regret to those who suffered as a result of the White Terror,” he said.
The president said that since then, more than 7,000 cases had resulted in compensation by the government to victims or families.
Ma said that while the government could not travel back in time to right wrongs, it could apologize, compensate the victims and prevent similar tragedies from happening again.
Ma also used the occasion to promote the recently signed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA).
Labor Party chairman Wu Jung-yuan (吳榮元), who also spoke at the event, called for reconciliation so that people could come to terms with the horrors of the past.
“We should look beyond our personal suffering and seek reconciliation and peace to achieve prosperity on both sides of the Taiwan Strait,” he said.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching