The White Terror era has not been put to rest because the public still doesn’t know exactly what happened during the period and its impact can still be felt today, speakers said yesterday at a conference in Taipei on the White Terror era.
“I remember that I used to play with a group of neighbors’ kids when I was little, and one day, two brothers who always played with us just disappeared,” former Presidential Office secretary-general Chen Shih-meng (陳師孟) told the forum. “We only learned vaguely from adults that the two brothers’ father was taken away by the military police and never came home, and their mother moved away with the two kids.”
“I think many people of my age have similar memories of the White Terror [era], but we never knew how the government operated [during the period] or had an in-depth understanding of it,” he said, adding that first-hand experiences or stories like his had cast a shadow over many Taiwanese, especially when it comes to expressing political ideas.
IRON HAND
The White Terror era in Taiwan refers to a period of time when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime — mostly under the leadership of dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), ruled Taiwan with an iron hand and killed or jailed thousands of political dissidents. To help the audience yesterday better understand how tightly the authoritarian regime of former dictators Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) watched over the people, Chen Tsui-lien (陳翠蓮), a professor at National Chengchi University’s (NCCU) Graduate Institute of Taiwanese History, gave some facts from her research.
“There were secret service agencies created by the government, the military and the KMT to keep an eye on people both inside and outside their respective organizations — there was even a special overseas commission within the KMT and overseas intelligence units within Taiwan’s embassies to monitor Taiwanese activities abroad,” she said.
She said that under the Investigation Bureau alone there were more than 30,000 uniformed or underground agents spying on Taiwanese in the 1970s.
WOUNDS
“The wounds of the White Terror [era] have never fully healed — the government never conducted a thorough investigation into it, never prosecuted anyone responsible for political repression and never fully compensated the victims,” said Wellington Koo (顧立雄), a member of the Lei Chen Foundation for Democracy and Human Rights. “That’s why it [the White Terror] still has an influence on Taiwanese society and often blocks social progress even today.”
“The twisted legal system that we have today is a relic from the authoritarian period,” said NCCU Taiwanese history professor Hsueh Hua-yuan (薛化元), another panelist at the forum.
“Whether you like it or not, the Constitution of the Republic of China says that the judiciary, the executive and the legislative branches of the government have to be independent of each other,” he said. “But our courts and prosecutors — except the Supreme Court — are all under the Ministry of Justice, which is part of the executive branch.”
Hsueh said the late dictators designed the government in this way so that the executive branch could control the legal system, “and political intervention in the judiciary is still there from time to time today.”
As Taiwanese society has yet to fully recover from the wounds of the White Terror era and clean up its fallout, speakers at the conference expressed concern that the authoritarian system could make an easy comeback.
Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said in her speech at the forum that the government has taken many measures that violate human rights or remind people of the authoritarian past since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took office.
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