Control Yuan member Kao Yung-cheng (高涌誠) yesterday unveiled a report on the military’s killing of 20 Chinese-Vietnamese refugees in Kinmen County (金門) in 1987 amid a standoff between Taiwan and China.
The refugees had departed from Hong Kong and stopped at a Chinese port before going ashore in Kinmen, where the shooting happened.
Kao presented his findings to the Control Yuan, after interviewing the military personnel involved in the incident. He also visited the site of the incident, and examined archives and documents kept by the military.
The report’s summary said that 20 Vietnamese nationals, who were of ethnic Chinese descent, came ashore on the islet of Lieyu (烈嶼) on a motorboat on March 7, 1987.
They were killed by soldiers stationed on islet upon orders from the army’s Kinmen Defense Command, the report said.
The shooting took place on Donggang (東岡) shore, and came to be known as the Donggang Incident, or the Lieyu massacre. The islet is off Kinmen Island, about 6km from Xiamen in China’s Fujian Province.
Accounts of the shooting soon leaked, as conscripts returned home after their mandatory service ended, Kao said, leading to newspapers reporting on the incident a few months later.
It also prompted Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers to demand an investigation by the Ministry of National Defense.
Initially, ministry officials did not talk to anyone outside the military establishment about the killing, and a gag order was issued by officers of the army’s 158th Division, which was responsible for the defense of Kinmen, Lieyu, and nearby islets against China.
“Files and records about the incident do exist in the archives kept by the army, but these were not open to the public,” Kao said.
The command interviewed and questioned soldiers who were involved to compile a preliminary report, he said.
Meanwhile, under pressure from lawmakers, a military court conducted an investigation, which concluded in September 1987, he said.
The military court recommended charges against several unit commanders for the killing of unarmed civilians.
A division leader, a brigade commander and two company officers were handed prison terms of less than two years, but the sentences were suspended, with the court saying “there are mitigating circumstances, as they [the defendants] took action out of duty and responsibility.”
Kao said he reopened the case last year, because many reports had been written over the decades by people involved, followed by second-hand accounts.
Some people retold the original accounts with exaggeration and wildly different information regarding the number of deaths and the circumstances which led to the killings, he said.
“With the pervasive use of social media in recent years, people have been retelling the 1987 incident, creating new reports, which are replete with errors. So I felt the responsibility to investigate and straighten the facts,” Kao said.
“I also did it to avoid an international misunderstanding, as there was confusion on the original departure points of the Vietnamese nationals,” Kao said.
Kao pointed to the Cold War and the tense military standoff between Taiwan and China at the time, with frequent enemy intrusions and shooting between the two sides on frontline islands.
“Up to early 1980s, Taiwan had an open policy to accept Vietnamese refugees fleeing from conflict and postwar turbulence, most of them fleeing by boat to Hong Kong, China or Taiwan,” the report said.
They were of Chinese descent, although they were Vietnamese citizens, the report said.
The inspection equipment and data transmission system for new robotic dogs that Taipei is planning to use for sidewalk patrols were developed by a Taiwanese company, the city’s New Construction Office said today, dismissing concerns that the China-made robots could pose a security risk. The city is bringing in smart robotic dogs to help with sidewalk inspections, Taipei Deputy Mayor Lee Ssu-chuan (李四川) said on Facebook. Equipped with a panoramic surveillance system, the robots would be able to automatically flag problems and easily navigate narrow sidewalks, making inspections faster and more accurate, Lee said. By collecting more accurate data, they would help Taipei
TAKING STOCK: The USMC is rebuilding a once-abandoned airfield in Palau to support large-scale ground operations as China’s missile range grows, Naval News reported The US Marine Corps (USMC) is considering new sites for stockpiling equipment in the West Pacific to harden military supply chains and enhance mobility across the Indo-Pacific region, US-based Naval News reported on Saturday. The proposed sites in Palau — one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — and Australia would enable a “rapid standup of stored equipment within a year” of the program’s approval, the report said, citing documents published by the USMC last month. In Palau, the service is rebuilding a formerly abandoned World War II-era airfield and establishing ancillary structures to support large-scale ground operations “as China’s missile range and magazine
STATS: Taiwan’s average life expectancy of 80.77 years was lower than that of Japan, Singapore and South Korea, but higher than in China, Malaysia and Indonesia Taiwan’s average life expectancy last year increased to 80.77 years, but was still not back to its pre-COVID-19 pandemic peak of 81.32 years in 2020, the Ministry of the Interior said yesterday. The average life expectancy last year increased the 0.54 years from 2023, the ministry said in a statement. For men and women, the average life expectancy last year was 77.42 years and 84.30 years respectively, up 0.48 years and 0.56 years from the previous year. Taiwan’s average life expectancy peaked at 81.32 years in 2020, as the nation was relatively unaffected by the pandemic that year. The metric
A 72-year-old man in Kaohsiung was sentenced to 40 days in jail after he was found having sex with a 67-year-old woman under a slide in a public park on Sunday afternoon. At 3pm on Sunday, a mother surnamed Liang (梁) was with her child at a neighborhood park when they found the man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and woman, surnamed Huang (黃), underneath the slide. Liang took her child away from the scene, took photographs of the two and called the police, who arrived and arrested the couple. During questioning, Tsai told police that he had met Huang that day and offered to
RSS