Recently declassified National Security Bureau files showed that the former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime was keeping close tabs on Formosa Magazine and learned the entire content of its first issue before it went to print.
Formosa Magazine was at the center of 1979’s Kaohsiung Incident, also known as the Formosa Incident.
The magazine organized a pro-democracy demonstration on Dec. 10, 1979. It was intended to commemorate Human Rights Day.
Photo provided by the Transitional Justice Commission
The event turned violent when members of the crowd unknown to the organizers — and widely believed to have been provocateurs — began attacking police. The KMT authorities used the Incident as an excuse to arrest virtually all well-known opposition leaders.
Tuesday is the 40th anniversary of the Kaohsiung Incident.
The commission on Friday said that it has been in contact with the bureau since the Political Archives Act (政治檔案條例) was passed, in the hope of obtaining declassified files about the Incident.
The commission said that it worked closely with several agencies to facilitate the declassification and transfer of data about state-perpetrated injustice during the White Terror era.
At first it was not easy, as all files on the Kaohsiung Incident had been permanently classified, the commission said.
Thanks to assistance from the Presidential Office and National Security Council, the classified documents eventually saw the light of day, it said.
The data detailed how the then-KMT government surveilled Formosa Magazine from when it was founded to the publication of its first issue, the commission said, adding that the magazine was being so closely monitored that the KMT knew the entire content of its first issue before it went to print, including the layout of its inside pages.
In the few months of the short-lived magazine’s life, intelligence agencies had embedded informants in the magazine’s office to monitor every move, the commission said.
The declassified data also offered insight into the KMT’s decisionmaking process after the Kaohsiung Incident, including its choice to round up the activists and quash dissents, all of which was missing from previously released information, the commission said.
The information would shed new light on the Incident once it is made available to the public, it added.
The National Archives Administration in 2002 began collecting data on the Incident, and last year began its sixth wave of data collection, sourcing data from the National Security Bureau, the National Police Agency and the Investigation Bureau, the commission said.
A substantial portion of the most recent data showed that many non-governmental entities had been acting on the orders of intelligence agencies and feeding them information about the magazine, it said.
Costa Rica sent a group of intelligence officials to Taiwan for a short-term training program, the first time the Central American country has done so since the countries ended official diplomatic relations in 2007, a Costa Rican media outlet reported last week. Five officials from the Costa Rican Directorate of Intelligence and Security last month spent 23 days in Taipei undergoing a series of training sessions focused on national security, La Nacion reported on Friday, quoting unnamed sources. The Costa Rican government has not confirmed the report. The Chinese embassy in Costa Rica protested the news, saying in a statement issued the same
Taiwan’s Liu Ming-i, right, who also goes by the name Ray Liu, poses with a Chinese Taipei flag after winning the gold medal in the men’s physique 170cm competition at the International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation Asian Championship in Ajman, United Arab Emirates, yesterday.
A year-long renovation of Taipei’s Bangka Park (艋舺公園) began yesterday, as city workers fenced off the site and cleared out belongings left by homeless residents who had been living there. Despite protests from displaced residents, a city official defended the government’s relocation efforts, saying transitional housing has been offered. The renovation of the park in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華), near Longshan Temple (龍山寺), began at 9am yesterday, as about 20 homeless people packed their belongings and left after being asked to move by city personnel. Among them was a 90-year-old woman surnamed Wang (王), who last week said that she had no plans
TO BE APPEALED: The environment ministry said coal reduction goals had to be reached within two months, which was against the principle of legitimate expectation The Taipei High Administrative Court on Thursday ruled in favor of the Taichung Environmental Protection Bureau in its administrative litigation against the Ministry of Environment for the rescission of a NT$18 million fine (US$609,570) imposed by the bureau on the Taichung Power Plant in 2019 for alleged excess coal power generation. The bureau in November 2019 revised what it said was a “slip of the pen” in the text of the operating permit granted to the plant — which is run by Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) — in October 2017. The permit originally read: “reduce coal use by 40 percent from Jan.