Nine years have passed since March 30, 2014, when half a million people gathered on Taipei’s Ketagalan Boulevard to protest against the Cross-Strait Agreement on Trade in Services. While originally intended to express concern about the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government throwing Taiwan’s door wide open to China, the rally also voiced widespread disapproval of police’s bloody dispersal of protesters occupying part of the Executive Yuan, which had happened one week earlier, in the early hours of March 24.
Unfortunately, then-premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺), then-president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and other government officials who instigated the police deployment have never been called to account, and neither have the police officers who acted violently, but who, according to the police, “could not be identified.”
It is therefore welcome news that on March 23, nine years after the events, the Control Yuan proposed a set of corrective measures to the Executive Yuan, the Ministry of the Interior, the National Police Agency, the Taipei City Police Department and the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office, telling them to review their actions and make improvements. For the victims of that night’s police violence, this belated justice is a small victory, but also a great one.
The damage that was done that night can hardly be erased. It came as a shock that police methods characteristic of the authoritarian era could still be employed in a free and democratic Taiwan. Nonetheless, through many years of litigation and the Control Yuan’s corrective measures, we have told the public that when police face a crowd of protesters employing civil disobedience, it is wrong to attack them and treat them in a vindictive manner.
The Control Yuan’s decision also gives another slap in the face to Ma and Jiang for saying that they supported police’s eviction of the student protesters and that police got the crowd to leave by just “patting them on the shoulder.”
In recent years, China’s hostility to Taiwan has been going from bad to worse. Its use of the Internet and economic, political, military and other means to threaten Taiwan has become commonplace. Were it not for the Sunflower movement, would the nation have been lured into a trap set by China? What about Ma, who is attracting attention with his visit to China? Does he still think that signing the service trade agreement with China was the right thing to do?
Pan Kuan is a New Taipei City resident who took part in the 2014 Sunflower movement.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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