One day after the Supreme Court denied a prosecutors’ appeal of Yunlin County Commissioner Su Chih-fen’s (蘇治芬) acquittal on corruption charges, Su posted scathing comments on her Facebook describing the Yunlin County Prosecutors’ Office as cronies of an unjust government.
Su, a member of the Democratic Progressive Party, was in November 2008 charged by prosecutors with accepting NT$5 million (US$151,000) in bribes to speed up the approval of a landfill project in the county by skipping an environmental assessment. The prosecutors had called for Su to be given a 15-year sentence and an eight-year suspension of civil rights.
She was acquitted in the first and second ruling.
Photo: Chan Shih-hung, Taipei Times
“The prosecutors’ office sent seven prosecutors and indicted me as a felon on charges of graft and corruption, asking for 15 years in prison and the removal of my civil rights for eight years,” Su said in her Facebook post on Friday.
Su once led an 11-day hunger strike to protest against what she said was political persecution.
“They mentioned my family and what they had contributed to the country during the process of its democratization, but my parents and my younger brother were all imprisoned wrongfully,” Su said. “They wanted me dead; I would rather be dead than hear them defile the name of my family with their mouths.”
Su said that her father, Su Tung-chi (蘇東啟), was taken away in the middle of night during the White Terror era, when she was only eight years old.
The Martial Law era, which lasted from 1949 to 1987, served as a tool of the government to oppress the people and the democracy movement then, and her father’s arrest was only the beginning of a long nightmare, Su wrote as she listed the many torments her family had undergone.
Su said that during the past four years, she had never had a moment of peace and she was heavy of heart because the unjust government ran unchecked, adding that the many divisions within Taiwan’s society and the inability of people to come to terms filled the nation with despair.
“The Taiwan I have seen in the past four years is one where ignorance reigns supreme and the enlightenment of a solution is hard to find,” Su wrote, adding that the burden the nation bore was saddening.
In response to her post, a number of netizens voiced their support for Su, thanking her family for the sacrifices they made for the democratization of Taiwan while some called her brave, even branding her “Taiwan’s Aung San Suu Kyi.”
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