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.
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