Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (
Chang told Sun's relatives that the Presidential Office would be willing to restore Sun's reputation immediately.
"General Sun's wife says that her family does not want any state compensation, but only requires the government to formally declare Sun's innocence," Chang said after leaving Sun's house in Taichung yesterday.
The premier said that he would ask the Control Yuan to deliver its report to the President's Human Rights Task Force to discuss how to restore Sun's reputation.
Chang stressed that the Control Yuan's report proved that Sun did not attempt a coup against then-president Chiang Kai-shek (
"Sun, however, was put under house arrest under the martial law regulations of the time, which also saw lots of dissidents killed or jailed in other political persecution campaigns," Chang said. "Now the government has to restore those victims' reputation and integrity, and more importantly, prevent similar cases from happening again."
General Sun's wife, Chang Mei-ing (
"In addition to my husband, many of his subordinates were also persecuted over this case," Sun's wife told the premier, "and therefore I believe that money is not the most important consideration for those military officials. They all want the government to declare their innocence in formal documents."
Chang promised to do everything in his power to satisfy Sun's relatives, saying that it was time to step out of the shadow cast by the era of political persecution and to create a real democratic society.
A Control Yuan hearing on Jan. 9, approving the findings of an investigative report, cleared the name of the late General Sun, who was born in 1900 and died in 1990.
The famous case dates from May 1955 when Major Kuo Ting-liang (
More than 300 people were implicated in the case, more than 30 of whom were sentenced to prison terms or death.
After Chiang Ching-kuo's (蔣經國) death in 1988, the Control Yuan decided to re-open an earlier investigation into Sun's case. Two months later, on March 20, the government officially announced that Sun was a free man. Sun died at his house in Taichung on Nov. 19, 1990.
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