Thu, Aug 09, 2018 page3

• Tainan valuing profit over landowner rights: protesters

  • By Ann Maxon / Staff reporter
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  Land rights advocates opposed to a Tainan railway relocation project yesterday accused the government of trading the land rights of more than 1,000 residents for NT$51 billion (NT$1.67 billion) of business profits.

  Six people from the Taiwan Land Justice Action Union and a community group opposed to the relocation project demonstrated outside the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) headquarters in Taipei.

  While they had originally planned to protest in front of the main entrance on Beiping E Road, police had set up barricades blocking the entrance and dispatched about 100 officers to the area, forcing the demonstrators to move to Shaoxing N Street.

  The Tainan City Government in 2007 scrapped a plan to move a railway line underground and opted for a more complex alternative, in which the line would not only be moved underground, but also moved eastward, union president Chen Chih-hsiao (陳致曉) said.

  According to government documents, moving the line eastward would require the city government to expropriate 3.03 hectares of private land, which is 2.8 hectares more than the land it would need to expropriate if the line was moved underground in its current area, Chen said.

  The additional land would allow more lucrative land development projects, with the area surrounding the train station alone estimated to generate NT$51 billion for the city government, he said.

  Under this plan, more than 1,000 residents from a total of 323 units would be forced to leave their homes, he added.

  “For the government, their homes are just a line that can be erased on a map, but we know that every dot on the map is a family and that they are real people,” Chen said.

  While the government has yet to approve the procedures to expropriate the land, construction work on public land begun in March last year and many residents have been asked to accept settlement offers in exchange for their land rights, he said.

  Although some have agreed, the majority of the residents — more than 200 — have opposed the expropriation, he added.

  On July 20, a woman surnamed Tseng (曾) committed suicide by swallowing detergent, reportedly out of concern that her apartment building could be demolished due to the planned land expropriation.

  The government has said her death was irrelevant to the expropriation, because her home is not in the affected area.

  While it it true that Tseng’s apartment is not in the area to be expropriated, it is part of a complex that partially falls in the area, Chen said.

  If other parts of the complex are demolished, her apartment could be demolished too, Chen said, adding that Tseng’s daughter had told the police that her mother had been distressed about possibly losing her home.

  “The government is looting poor people’s homes and calling it a political achievement,” National Chengchi University professor Hsu Shih-jung (徐世榮) said.

  He urged the DPP to “do better,” saying that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has emphasized the need to communicate with the public, yet her party does not even allow a protest in front of its headquarters.

  The relocation project was approved by the Executive Yuan on Sept. 9, 2009. It was originally scheduled to be completed by May last year, but delayed due to opposition from local residents.
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