Television viewers last Saturday witnessed violence committed by pan-blue demonstrators, who insanely attacked police officers maintaining order on Ketagalan Boulevard with slingshots and sticks and threw Molotov cocktails, fire extinguishers and rocks. Journalists documenting the event also fell victim to the crowd's brutality. Our law does not tolerate such barbarism. We urge judicial authorities to speed up their investigation so that the outlaws who commit-ted crimes that night can be put behind bars.
According to police accounts, dozens of citizens and law enforcement officers were injured that day, including a dozen photographers and reporters, some of them women. These brutal beatings startled television audiences. By yesterday, Taipei police had gathered concrete evidence showing that at least two protesters who encouraged other demonstrators to attack the police and journalists belong to organized crime groups.
In this light, we can see that some gangs had been waiting for an opportune moment to take action in order to benefit from the political turmoil. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Secretary-General Lin Feng-cheng (
In retrospect, the disorder in the wake of the presidential election can be traced back to the Taiwanese media. News organizations did not act according to professional ethics, but instead reported inflated opinion polls conducted with specific political motives. On election day, in their competition for ratings, many TV news programs reported fraudulent vote figures showing that the pan-blue camp led by a large margin. The reported results were completely inconsistent with those reported by the Central Election Commission (
In addition, KMT Chairman Lien Chan (
Taiwan upholds not only democracy but also the rule of law. Election conflicts among different parties are not something new for us, but have been occurring ever since the implementation of local autonomy. Therefore, if Lien and Soong are not satisfied with the election results, they should seek a solution through the judicial system. That's what opposition leaders should do, rather than repeating untrue accusations. Nor should they attempt to force President Chen Shui-bian's (
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