The military police searching the home of a civilian selling White Terror era documents without a warrant last month have sparked a public uproar, bringing back memories of an authoritarian regime where people were arbitrarily accused of being communists or rebels.
Just weeks before the scandal, the term “transitional justice” had grabbed the headlines in the form of cries urging the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to return its ill-gotten wealth. However, for some people, such as Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Yu Mei-nu (尤美女), the term means much more.
Yu has just refocused the public’s attention on a draft legislation on overseeing the archives of political persecution cases when the farce played out by the military took place.
Photo: Alison Hsiao
Yu first proposed the bill in 2012 — which was co-drafted with the Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation (TATR) and modeled on the Stasi Records Act passed by Germany in 1991 — but the motion was blocked at least 74 times by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in the Procedure Committee, preventing it from being referred to a legislative committee for deliberation.
Asked about the urgency of drafting a law on overseeing the political archives when there is an Archives Act (檔案法), Yu said that a political archives act, if promulgated, would ensure greater transparency, as well as better collection and organization of files relating to the 228 Incident and the White Terror era.
“Under the Archives Act, access to political files is not entirely transparent under the pretext of protection of personal information,” she said. “The draft political archives act proposes to draw a distinction between ‘political victims’ and ‘perpetrators,’ and grant the former [and their families], not the latter, free access to the files and protection of privacy. Moreover, access granted to the political victims could trump the perpetrators’ right to privacy.”
TATR chairperson Huang Cheng-yi (黃丞儀) agreed, saying that in light of the concern over personal privacy, people applying to view sensitive files should be categorized into different groups, such as political victims, their families, journalists, academics or other unrelated people, which is something that the Archives Act has failed to do.
“There is currently no written regulation for the National Archives Administration [NAA] to determine what information is to be redacted in a document requested by an applicant; it is entirely dependent on the NAA staff’s personal judgement, which is extremely inappropriate,” Huang said in an e-mail.
Another problem that applicants face is not knowing the extent of materials or documents available on a certain person or case that they wish to view or study.
When the imbroglio over the military police search broke out, the TATR said that, aside from the specter of an authoritarian mentality, it showed how little people know of how many more bales of documents are in which institutions, as the Archives Act allows for documents to be filed or stored in places where they were issued rather than for them to be transferred to the NAA.
In the face of this fragmented system, what is most needed is a legal basis “for the government to take stock of how many documents should be categorized as political, have them collected, conserved, studied and made public on certain conditions, and establish an institution specifically responsible for the management and research of the documents,” the TATR said.
According to the military, the documents held and sold online by the civilian were related to Chinese communist spies and their confessions after they surrendered to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government in the 1960s and 1970s.
Another collector soon revealed that he possessed more than 1,000 of the same kind of documents. This raises the question of why they are in the hands of private collectors.
The most likely scenario is they were removed before the Archives Act took effect in 2002; if not, the agencies responsible for the documents would have to be held accountable, Yu said.
However, the shortcomings of the Archives Act is not a reason for people to fall prey to the conspiracy theory that the government has been destroying files because of a political motive, as many Internet users have been saying after the warrantless search, former TATR executive secretary Yeh Hung-ling (葉虹靈) said.
The public concern might have been aggravated by memories of how the manuscripts consisting of more than 4 million words written during his 10 years behind bars by Lei Chen (雷震), cofounder and publisher of Free China (自由中國) magazine and a former high-ranking KMT official, were burned in 1988, two weeks after a then-Control Yuan member demanded their return.
However, since the establishment of the NAA in 2001 and the enactment of the Archives Act in 2002, “millions of pages of political documents have been stored in the NAA which could be read if requested, and up until now the NAA is still receiving files related to the White Terror era from various government agencies every year,” Yeh said.
The concern is not about the files being destroyed, but that “you do not know what you do not know,” she said. “A political archives act, based on our version, could exert greater force on the collection of political files from certain bodies, such as the KMT, which has a party history archive of its own.”
A committee consisting of academics and officials could be established in accordance with the proposed political archives act to help the government ascertain what is still missing in the puzzle.
“Each political persecution case involves several stages — information collection, arrest, confession, interrogation, etc. The dots could be connected or recognized as missing with the help of experts,” White Terror era researcher Lin Yi-hsuan (林邑軒) said.
Lin said he hoped that the discussion whipped up by the scandal could increase public awareness about the state of Taiwan’s historical documents.
Lin Chuan-kai (林傳凱), a doctoral candidate in sociology at National Taiwan University who has conducted research into the White Terror era for years, in a statement read at an exhibition showcasing White Terror era materials, said that the hurdle Taiwan’s transitional justice faces is “not that there are no files, but that they are not organized.”
With society being unfamiliar with how far the historical studies and transitional justice efforts have already gone, “the public is therefore still trapped in the simple illusion that the ‘files have to be saved,’” he added.
Whether one believes it is merely a coincidence for the military to have taken such an action when transitional justice is said to be pursued soon, addressing legacies of past repression and redressing past abuses “requires more than calling Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son murderers and tearing down the old Chiang statues,” Lin Chuan-kai said.
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