Transitional Justice Commission member Yang Tsui (楊翠) yesterday rejected the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) claim that the commission “has blood on its hands” for allegedly planning to target the party’s New Taipei City mayoral candidate Hou You-yi (侯友宜), saying that such a proposal did not come up at the commission’s high-level decisionmaking meetings.
Yang, the commission’s spokeswoman, made the remarks on Facebook early yesterday, a day after a group of KMT lawmakers staged a protest outside the commission’s office building, referring to the Executive Yuan-affiliated body as Dong Chang (東廠), the Ming Dynasty-era secret police and spy agency.
“Ten KMT lawmakers forced their way into the commission, plastering banners on our building’s walls and humiliating us with their harsh words,” Yang said.
Photo: Chen Yu-fu, Taipei Times
“They accused the commission of cracking down on dissidents and said that our hands are stained with blood. How could a political party with the blood of countless lives on their hands make such an outrageous accusation?” she said.
Yang said that commission Chairman Huang Huang-hsiung (黃煌雄) and three commission members bowed in apology over a leaked recording — which revealed former commission deputy chairman Chang Tien-chin (張天欽) allegedly proposing to manipulate public opinion against Hou — not because they had done anything wrong.
“Rather, the apology was made because as commission members we must apologize for the damage the incident had caused political victims and their families, as well as to the grand project of transitional justice,” she said.
While acknowledging that Chang’s comments at the unofficial meeting were inappropriate, Yang said it is surprising that no one asked whether his proposal was adopted by the commission as an official resolution.
“I can tell everyone that no one has proposed the idea of targeting Hou at any of our high-level policymaking meetings, nor have any discussions and resolutions been made on such an issue,” Yang said.
The meeting took place on Aug. 24 and was allegedly attended by Chang, commission Secretary-General Hsu Chun-ju (許君如), as well as two researchers and two associate researchers.
According to a partial transcript published by the Chinese-language Mirror Media magazine on Wednesday last week, Chang asked the participants to brainstorm on how to enforce a lustration law that the commission had planned to draw up and, specifically, how to use it against Hou, whom Chang called the “most despicable case [of concern] in transitional justice.”
“It would be a pity if we do not manipulate [opinion] against Hou,” Chang allegedly 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:
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