On the 42nd anniversary of Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) death, Minister of the Interior Yeh Jiunn-rong (葉俊榮) yesterday said that vandalizing statues of the late dictator is against the law and the scrapping of guidelines for their installation last month has no bearing on that.
Yeh made the remarks at the legislature in response to media inquiries over whether the termination of the regulations meant that acts of vandalism against Chiang’s statutes would now be tacitly permitted.
There have been several incidents in which Chiang statues have been decapitated, allegedly by members of a group called the “Taiwan Nation-building Construction Crew.”
Photo courtesy of a ‘Taipei Times’ reader
In a democratic society, all rationally expressed opinions that are within the constraints of the law should be respected, but actions that violate the law would be dealt with in the appropriate way, Yeh said.
The ministry’s guidelines for erecting the statues were written when Chiang died in 1975 and have not been common practice for a long time, Yeh said.
The guidelines were established for “a specific set of circumstances” when local governments were busy erecting statues and building memorials on their own initiative and the ministry issued them to avoid the excess proliferation of Chiang busts and statues.
“Those concerns are out of date now,” he said, adding that the guidelines were rescinded on March 7, the day after Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Kolas Yotaka criticized them during an legislative question-and-answer session.
Kolas Yotaka slammed the ministry for retaining the guidelines and read aloud some of their stipulations, including that statues must “sufficiently display the kindness and dignity of his Eminence Chiang’s divine countenance” and that the busts or statues must be more than 2m high “so that people can look up to them.”
In response, the ministry said it would remove them, which it did by issuing an order terminating them to the Ministry of National Defense, the Ministry of Education and local governments nationwide.
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