An exhibition of formerly classified records and artworks depicting the use of torture during the White Terror era has opened at the Tsai Jui-yueh Dance Research Institute/Rose Historic Site (蔡瑞月舞蹈社/玫瑰古蹟) in Taipei.
Dialogues With the Past, Present and Future (彼時影‧未來光), organized by the Transitional Justice Commission, opened on Friday last week and runs through July 26.
Through its review of military court files from the White Terror era, when many people who opposed the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) authoritarian government were tried by military, rather than civilian courts, the commission learned that many victims were kept under surveillance, and in many cases authorities had used torture to extract confessions, commission member Chen Yu-fan (陳雨凡) said on Tuesday.
Photo: Chen Yu-fu, Taipei Times
Several works by artist Ouyang Chien-hua (歐陽劍華), a White Terror victim, depict torture methods used during that time, Chen said.
Ouyang, then a school principal on Kinmen, was arrested and imprisoned after being reported for saying that “if Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) was so great, he would not have lost” the Chinese Civil War to the Chinese Communist Party.
While in prison, Ouyang made a record of torture methods used on other inmates, including the pulling of fingernails, water torture, being forced into a cramped position for long periods, and after his release he used those records to highlight the torture and abuse, Chen said.
One piece depicts a pregnant woman who was jailed on political charges and suffered a miscarriage after being beaten during her incarceration, he said.
One man was beaten and forced to consume a huge quantity of salt before being sent back to his cell, where the only water he could get was from the cell’s toilet, Ouyang wrote.
Chen said another painting depicts a man who bit off his own tongue in a bid to commit suicide.
Judges would ask police and public security officials if defendants’ confessions had been extracted through torture, and would routinely be told “no,” but the lack of any investigations showed how broken the judiciary was during the Martial Law era, she said.
Also included in the exhibition are surveillance records on pro-democracy advocate Lin I-hsiung (林義雄) from around the time his mother and twin daughters were murdered in the family home in Taipei on Feb. 28, 1980, and a third daughter left badly wounded.
The research institute is the rebuilt Japanese-style building on the site of Taiwanese modern dance pioneer and human rights activist Tsai Jui-yueh’s (蔡瑞月) China Dance Club.
Tsai was jailed for three years on Green Island as a political prisoner.
Since her death in 2005, the foundation and the Rose Historic Site have played a prominent role in promoting Taiwan’s human rights movement.
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