Attempts at achieving a form of transitional justice to deal with the fissures brought on by the nation’s complex colonial past are foundering, in no small part due to the lack of an agreement of what is to be preserved, what the goal of a transitional justice program should be, or what historical narrative is to be adopted.
One example is the Ministry of Culture’s proposed legislation to preserve designated sites of injustice. The objective of the bill would be to provide educational opportunities to keep alive awareness of human rights violations perpetrated during the White Terror period of authoritarian rule under the post-World War II Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime.
These sites would be used to keep Taiwanese informed about their past and to achieve a form of healing.
This is not how the KMT sees it.
Suspicious that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government is seeking to use transitional justice as an excuse to politicize the past, KMT legislators on Oct. 30 proposed expanding the scope of the sites to include injustices committed during the Qing Dynasty and the Japanese colonial rule.
Is the scope defined as the White Terror era between the Japanese surrender in 1945 and the end of the White Terror in 1992 arbitrary and unfairly targeting the KMT?
On Tuesday last week DPP legislators and human rights groups told a news conference in Taipei that the KMT proposals were a cynical attempt to trivialize the party’s history of autocratic rule.
How far back does the government need to expand the scope before it stops being arbitrary? The answer to that would be that the White Terror period remains within living memory. Moreover, the KMT still exists. It forms the main opposition in the legislature, where it is doing its best to frustrate the government’s agenda. Its members are elected officials in every administrative region. KMT mayors and county commissioners are at the head of major cities, counties and special municipalities, including the nation’s capital.
By contrast, Japanese colonial rule ended in Taiwan in 1945. The Qing Dynasty ceded all control over Taiwan to Tokyo with the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. From that perspective, the designated scope does not appear so arbitrary anymore.
The term “living memory” can sound a little abstract. Take a look at the article “Daring to remember Taiwan’s past,” published today by Wei Hsin-chi (魏新奇), director of the WTJ Human Right, Culture and Education Association, about how letters from his father, Wei Ting-jao (魏廷朝), incarcerated in the Jingmei Military Detention Center for his role in the Kaohsiung Incident of 1979, brought back poignant memories of weekly family reunions before the father’s death in 1999. He writes: “I had forgotten that I remember it all.”
There is no recrimination in that article, no hate directed at the past KMT regime, only hope and forgiveness. That is the essence and the goal of transitional justice.
Then, there is the article “A question of loyalty to the nation” by former deputy secretary-general of the Lee Teng-hui Foundation Chu Meng-hsiang (朱孟庠), questioning how KMT Legislator Weng Hsiao-ling (翁曉玲) can identify so explicitly with China when she is a 17th-generation Taiwanese with roots in Chiayi County, and who interprets her father and grandfather’s association with the Taiwanese Cultural Association, founded by Taiwanese democracy pioneer Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水), as representative of their anti-Japanese colonial ideology on the part of a “great China,” as opposed to being informed by a Taiwan nationalist loyalty.
This is the power of narrative and of the ideological manipulation of memory.
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