The Council for Cultural Affairs yesterday said that the Jingmei and Green Island human rights cultural parks would become part of a national human rights museum that would focus solely on human rights-related exhibitions and research.
The announcement was made to resolve a long-running debate over the two parks’ name and focus.
“There has been controversy over whether the two ‘human rights cultural parks’ should focus on human rights or culture,” Council for Cultural Affairs Minister Emile Sheng (盛治仁) told a news conference in Taipei. “I am going to make it very clear that, from now on, human rights-related exhibitions and research on human rights issues will be a priority for the two parks.”
Sheng’s decision reverses the position taken by his predecessor, Huang Pi-tuan (黃碧端), who sparked controversy last year when she renamed the two human rights parks “cultural parks” to allow artists to make use of the space.
The two parks, located in Jingmei, Taipei, and on Green Island, Taitung, were the site of prisons for political dissidents during the 38 years of martial law when Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) were in power.
Many human rights groups protested Huang’s decision, suspecting the move was an attempt by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to cover up human rights violations perpetrated by the KMT from 1949 through 1987.
Faced with public pressure, Huang agreed to rename the two parks “human rights cultural parks,” but that only triggered more debate on whether the parks should focus on human rights or cultural events.
“The two parks will become campuses for a planned national human rights museum and will be used to highlight what the government did wrong in the past so that the mistakes won’t be repeated,” Sheng said. “Human rights struggles in other countries will also be represented.”
Although a national human rights museum will not be officially established until the council is upgraded to a ministry in two years, Council for Cultural Affairs Vice Minister Hong Ching-feng (洪慶峰) said the council would start preparatory work for the museum.
“For instance, there were as many as 140,000 political victims during the Martial Law era and thousands still haven’t been interviewed,” Hong said. “We will begin to interview them as soon as possible, before it’s too late.”
“If we don’t begin research right now, it would be meaningless to have a national human rights museum with nothing inside,” he said.
Commenting on the move, Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation executive secretary Yeh Hung-ling (葉虹靈) said that the organization was pleased the government was finally listening to what human rights groups had long called for.
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