Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers yesterday said Miaoli County Commissioner Liu Cheng-hung’s (劉政鴻) apology on Thursday should have been aimed at the Dapu Borough (大浦) farmers that were forced to give up their land for a science park expansion.
Liu apologized for the incident alongside Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) for the first time on Thursday, saying he knew the farmers had “suffered great losses,” and that he did not know that there were rice paddies before the county government drove in excavators.
Liu then apologized to Miaoli County residents, farmers nationwide, Wu and also President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) for causing him “worry and concern.”
However, DPP lawmakers said Liu, of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), stopped short of apologizing to the 24 Dapu borough farming families that saw their farmland seized by the county government.
“He did not aim his [apology] at the Dapu Borough farmers. It’s clear that his apology was forced,” DPP Legislator Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) said yesterday.
She also hinted that Liu’s apology likely came after pressure from the president or the premier, saying: “In the future, [Liu’s] actions toward the Dapu farmland controversy will likely be taken under directions from Ma and Wu.”
The issue over land expropriation in Miaoli County has been growing over the past month after farmers protested in front of the Presidential Office, saying that they were forcibly evicted from the farmland by county police.
The land seizures were part of a 28 hectare development in order to expand the Jhunan science park currently under construction in the area.
In an attempt to resolve the issue, Wu said on Thursday the 24 households would be given plots the same size as their seized land within a 5 hectare reserved agricultural zone within the new science park. The farmers said the move was unacceptable, adding they just want their land back.
DPP Legislator Huang Wei-cher (黃偉哲) said it was likely that the government would replace the farmers’ land with plots located near a highway with a lower value and in a more peripheral location.
“It’s possible that some people want to speculate on this land, so the [government] expropriates land in the best location and then returns land to the farmers that is [less ideally] situated,” he said.
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