The Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) indifference to the military police’s contentious search of the home of a man possessing documents believed to be from the White Terror era shows that the party’s “self-reflection” on its conducts during that period is nothing but empty slogans, a former KMT spokesman said yesterday.
Most parties — including the Democratic Progressive Party, the People First Party and the New Power Party — were quick to condemn the Taipei Military Police Station on Sunday after reports emerged that officers had searched a man’s home on Feb. 19 without a warrant and confiscated three old government documents.
The KMT has been notable by its absence from the criticism, with only a handful of KMT lawmakers commenting on the incident yesterday.
“When military police infringe upon basic human rights and when significant documents concerning Taiwan’s White Terror era are at risk of vanishing or being destroyed, the KMT is still preoccupied with treating its members to banquets and striving for power,” former KMT spokesman Yang Wei-chung (楊偉中) posted on Facebook.
He said not one person in the higher echelons of the party or it its legislative caucus showed an ounce of concern about the military police’s violations of human rights in its treatment of the man, surnamed Wei (魏).
What the KMT has failed to realize is that this incident serves as solid proof that the party’s so-called self-reflection over the former authoritarian KMT regime’s conduct during the White Terror era has been a mere “formality” and empty talk, Yang said.
The White Terror era refers to the period after the KMT regime under former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) imposed martial law on Taiwan on May 19, 1949. It lasted for almost four decades. Tens of thousands of political opponents were imprisoned, tortured and killed.
Yang said that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), when he was KMT chairman, once said that the White Terror era was a serious stain on Taiwan’s human rights record.
“Ma said [the KMT] needed not only to engage in self-reflection through concrete actions, but also to educate our future generations so that they can learn from the lessons of history. He also pledged to bring the truth to light and avoid similar incidents in the future,” Yang said. “These promises sound particularly absurd at this moment.”
The Wei case shows that the serious stain on the nation’s human rights record could one day resurface its ugly head, while government records concerning the era have remained state secrets, Yang said.
It appears that the people who ought to learn from history are not the future generations, but rather those high up in the party’s ranks, he said.
“The KMT has repeatedly shrugged off growing calls for transitional justice as an attempt to sow the seeds of hatred ... but the party cannot turn a blind eye to this incident of human rights violation by military police,” Yang said.
In his post, Yang listed three demands: one, that the Ministry of National Defense investigate the case, publicize the entire probe and apologize to the public; two, that lawmakers across party lines work to pass the draft political archive act, which has been blocked by the KMT caucus at least 74 times; and three, that the KMT’s headquarters publicly release and/or publish all political documents in its archive that are related to the authoritarian period.
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