For a while, WikiLeaks has been releasing a long series of US diplomatic cables on its Web site. This has enraged the US, which is now treating WikiLeaks frontman Julian Assange as a terrorist and the WikiLeaks Web site as something similar to al-Qaeda.
The Web site recently released another large batch of diplomatic documents, but the brunt of the storm seems to have hit Taiwan rather than the US. It has affected politicians from both the governing and opposition parties, above all the top leadership of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), implicating everyone from the president and the old guard to the party’s rising stars.
It is well known that there is a lot of infighting among the top KMT leadership, but no one has known how severe it was. Now WikiLeaks has lifted the veil on their pompous ways and is causing them all substantial embarrassment. Former American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) director Stephen Young’s clear and concise reports outlined the jockeying for position among the KMT and President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) attempts at holding the old guard at bay. The newspapers have given these reports substantial space, thus satisfying the public’s thirst to know what is really going on.
WikiLeaks has surprised us all by showing how a small organization such as the AIT is able to obtain such complete, extensive, in-depth and crucial information about the political struggles among the top tier of Taiwan’s leaders. This goes beyond what any specialized media outlet, news reporter or even the mysterious National Security Bureau have been able to find out.
In some instances, the AIT has even been able to report information about things that these leaders wouldn’t even talk to their closest friends about. Does it really have to be like this?
Oh, the leaders of this nation. If they behave like this toward the US, then I am afraid that there is nothing that will not make its way to the ears of the Chinese leadership when our pro-Chinese officials visit Beijing.
As both president of the Republic of China (ROC) and chairman of the KMT, Ma is of course hit hardest of all by these revelations — he has to take responsibility for all of it. In addition, the question of whether his US green card remains valid has been given more coverage than all the other revelations.
The KMT’s all-out effort to get Young to verify that Ma’s green card was no longer valid reveals their lack of confidence. They made it look as if they were asking the US to clarify the matter, but in fact, they were asking them a favor. However, the US would not agree to tell a lie, and instead said that it was a very complex issue.
At first glance, this is a puzzling and unclear statement, but it amounts to saying that Ma’s green card has not expired. How could the question of whether it has expired be a complex issue? If Ma had given up his green card, according to US regulations, the answer would have been simply that his green card is no longer valid. There’s nothing complex about it.
If he did not give up his green card in accordance with regulations, and if he had not been a presidential candidate, the answer would have been simply that his green card is still valid. There is nothing complex about that, either.
As the green card issue has dragged on until this day, Ma has committed one mistake after the other, giving his opponents opportunity after opportunity to attack him, just as People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) did as he tried to handle the Chung Hsing Bills Finance scandal.
First, Ma deceived and betrayed his loyal comrades and readers at the Free Chinese Monthly during his school days in the US when he secretively applied for the US green card, after having penned moralizing articles criticizing Taiwanese students in the US for applying for green cards because it displayed a lack of trust in the ROC.
Second, he returned to the ROC to become a government official and then president. Following the moral standards he himself had set up, he should have given up his green card before doing anything else, lest he betray the ROC yet again. When it became a problem, he stubbornly continued to lie and used his contacts to ask the US to back up those lies.
When the US refused to give a straight answer, Ma relied on his image as a good and honest person, which he had been cultivating for so long, to finally overcome the problem. Unexpectedly, the WikiLeaks release has revealed how he begged the US to back his lies.
During Ma’s time as Taipei mayor, the public never saw him as a very capable person, but everyone always believed he was a good and honest man, clean and untainted by mundane and sordid matters — like a lovable little porcelain doll. Now, however, he has been inadvertently implicated in WikiLeaks’ attempts to put the US on the spot and the porcelain doll has crashed to the ground: not so lovable anymore.
This is not to say that he is not a good man. That could probably still pass as the truth, but he is no longer untainted by mundane and sordid matters. He is a mere human and a very ordinary human at that, because most people handle their green card problems in a much cleaner way than he has done.
That is probably why Wiki-Leaks has been likened to al- Qaeda: It brings a lot of people crashing down from their ivory towers.
Lin Cho-shui is a former Democratic Progressive Party legislator.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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