Transitional justice is, briefly put, to reckon with the past to find out widespread or systematic human rights abuse and make retribution, if possible.Taiwan is doing just that, selectively.
A spate of seminars and fora was held before and after February 28 to mark the anniversary of a massacre that followed a spontaneous riot on that day six decades ago.President fired the first shot in the war on Chiang Kai-shek by calling the Gimo the “chief culprit” of the February 28 Incident in the ongoing transitional justice campaign to remind older people of those bad old days they lived through and to impress on the younger generation the tyranny the Kuomintang’s alien regime had imposed on Taiwan.A couple of law experts even called for a posthumous trial of the Gimo – the abbreviated form of address for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek popularly used by the American officers serving under his Burma-India-China command toward the end of the Second World War – as a murderer responsible for the untimely death of tens of thousands of innocent native islanders, including Hoklo, Hakka and Austronesian tribesmen.
Generalissimo Chiang – he was not elected president yet in 1947 – certainly was responsible for the 2/28 Incident, for he was the head of state and the head of government at once.But he wasn’t either the chief culprit or the murderer, as some government-provided historians painted him to be.The Gimo didn’t order the slaughter.It was carried out by troops so ordered by their commanders.One example suffices.Innocent people were summarily executed under martial law.At least one city in Taiwan saw no such execution because the commander who had to enforce martial law didn’t order his troops to arrest people and shoot them to death. He was Maj. Gen. Su Shao-wen, who set up his command in the city of Hsinchu.Under no orders to shoot and kill, General Su even did not impose a curfew.In fact, the people of Hsinchu lived totally unperturbed for two weeks, while soldiers were their killing spree in some other parts of Taiwan.
The reign of white terror for which the Gimo was condemned as the executioner was purported to root out Communist infiltrators, not dissident native islanders. Many historians conveniently forget Taiwan faced the imminent threat of an invasion from China right after his arrival in Taipei at the end of 1949.Mao Zedong vowed to “wash Taiwan with blood,” ready to unleash his People’s Liberation Army for an all-out attack.The PLA circulated its paper in mimeographed sheets in Taiwan, announcing the imminent liberation of the people from Chiang’s bandit regime.On the wall of the main gate to the Taipei Railway Station was posted a bulletin announcing the execution of a score people convicted of treason every morning for a couple of months in early 1950.Almost all of them were Chinese mainlanders who were either card-carrying communist party members or sympathizers working for Mao’s cause of Taiwan’s liberation.Islanders were executed not because they were islanders but because they were communists or sympathizers considered rebels.
That threat was removed only after President Harry S. Truman neutralized the Taiwan Strait, where the U.S. Seventh Fleet started patrolling to preclude hostilities right after the outbreak of the Korean War in May of 1950.The Gimo had a Red phobia.He was kidnapped in Sian (Xian) in 1936 and forced to compromise with his archenemy Mao Zedong in exchange for freedom.In his early years in Taiwan, President Chiang Kai-shek was in constant fear of communist infiltration into his army.Taiwan was plunged into white terror.
The white terror cannot be justified.But history is understanding, not judgment.History is a dialogue between the past and the present.Societies have to reckon with their legacies good as well as bad.Distorted interpretation of those legacies for political gains shouldn’t be allowed, however.Yet that is what the current transitional justice movement aims at.
One ultimate aim of transitional justice is reconciliation.With justice done, the present has to be reconciled with the tortured past.Justice is done through acknowledgement of the wrongs done, offering of apologies, compensation for damages and erection of memorials or monuments.Inasmuch as the 2/28 Incident is concerned, justice has been done.What the government should do now is to heal the wounds of the bloody incident and achieve reconciliation between the present and the past, while seeking transitional justice for the organized and systematic human rights abuse the Japanese colonial authorities heaped on the people of Taiwan and the ethnic Chinese heaped on the indigenous Austronesians.
Why not help the former patients of Hansen’s disease segregated by the Japanese?President Chen Shui-bian has apologized for their continued segregation after 1945 but his government wants to remove them from the sanatorium they now call home and raze it to make way for a mass transit system.
Why not help Taiwan’s dwindling number of “comfort women”?They were forced to work as sex slaves serving troops of the Japanese imperial army in the Pacific War.All they want is an apology from the Japanese government.Has Taipei done anything to get Tokyo to offer it?
Why not reckon with the slaughter of ten times more than the victims of the 2/28 Incident the Japanese committed in the first decade of their colonization of Taiwan.For a mere five years, from 1898 to 1902, at least 11,950 people were slain as rebels.How about the Wushe Incident of 1930?The Atayal village of Wushe, with 270s inhabitants in 60 families, was totally destroyed.Nearly all of the men, women and children in the village were massacred by Japanese troops.Japanese army warplanes bombed the Atayal reservation. Gas bombs were dropped to smoke out those “rebels” who refused to surrender.
Why not seek transitional assistance for all indigenous people whose forebears the ethnic Chinese killed on Taiwan to grab their land and go into their forests to fell camphor trees?Their population in 1662 when Koxinga took Taiwan from the Dutch was estimated at 200,000.That population remained almost the same in 1945.It may not be genocide, but the fact is that countless thousands of Austronesians were slaughtered by the ethnic Chinese as well as the Japanese colonizers.James Davidson, the first American-born U.S. consul in Taipei at the turn of the twentieth century, reported aborigines were killed and their flesh was sold to ethnic Chinese who ate it.Why not reckon with these horrible legacies?
Of course, President Chen and his government are not going to do anything to get transitional justice done for all these people for the very simple reason that any help rendered won’t be translated into votes in the ballot boxes in the legislative elections in December and the presidential race in March next year.
（本文刊載於96.03.26 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）
