The storming of the Executive Yuan by student-led protesters last month could have been interpreted by the international community as a coup d’etat if it had not been dealt with immediately, Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) said yesterday.
Jiang made the remarks during the interpellation session yesterday on the floor, which was not blocked as some expected or planned — the Taiwan Solidarity Union said earlier in the week that it would boycott Jiang’s stepping on the podium for interpellation if he did not first apologize for the violent crackdown on protestors who had gathered at the Executive Yuan compound on March 24.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chiu Wen-yen (邱文彥) asked Jiang to again explain what happened on March 18 and March 23.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
Jiang said that after being notified of the “invasion by protesters at the Legislative Yuan,” he was aware of how serious police intervention at the Legislative Yuan would be, which if not sanctioned would infringe on legislative autonomy, so he made sure that Minister of the Interior Chen Wei-jen (陳威仁) first called Legislative Yuan Secretary-General Lin Hsi-shan (林錫山) to secure his approval for intervention at the Executive Yuan.
“To be 100 percent sure, Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) was also consulted about the matter, and he agreed with the decision to have police enter and remove invaders [from the Executive Yuan],” Jiang said.
“The occupation of the Legislative Yuan continued because Lin did not want us to manhandle opposition party lawmakers, who said they were blocking the entrances to ‘protect the students,’” Jiang said.
“And this is why the 323 occupation of the Executive Yuan was a completely different issue,” Jiang said, implying that while the legislature’s autonomy was to be respected, there was no such restriction for the “invasion” of the Executive Yuan.
He said that the protesters were not just trying to occupy the plaza outside the Executive Yuan’s main building, but “they also illegally entered offices, saying that they aimed to have the Executive Yuan unworkable the next day.”
“Those who got into the building were very close to breaking into the premier’s office, where confidential documents are kept. However, they were stopped by police,” he said.
“If they had succeeded, it would be these rioters and invaders in charge of the country’s top administrative center the next day. The country as a whole would have descended into chaos and the international community would have thought a coup d’etat or rebellion was attempted in the Republic of China,” he said.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tuan Yi-kang (段宜康), questioned the necessity and urgency of force used by police in the early morning of March 24, when protesters on the plaza were bludgeoned to the ground, and driven back by water cannons.
Tuan cited Jiang’s article published in the Chinese-language China Times in 2006, published while the protest against then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) was ongoing, which said that “it would be to underestimate the mobility and energy needed to maintain a democratic society if people are asked not to take to the streets just because they are now endowed with the right to vote.”
Jiang added in the article that if the value of public movements is to be denied in a democratic system “simply out of concern for the irrational character or the social instability that are inevitably entailed by a mass movement, [we] would be falling for a Hobbesian authoritarian thinking trap.”
Tuan accused Jiang of going against what he had previously written and of overusing police force, a “clear malfeasance” that Jiang has asked “the perpetrators themselves [National Police Agency] to probe.”
Tuan also said that although Jiang has repeatedly said that the “crackdown” was to protect the administrative center from dysfunction the next day and the documents from leaking out, “[Jiang] cannot explain why [he] still chose to violently evict the protestors outside the building, starting at about midnight, after the building was free of protesters,” Tuan 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
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
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