Taiwan, 50 years on, waits for final justice

By Andreas Landwehr

TAIPEI (DPA): Wu Zhan-tong had tears in his eyes as he recounted the massacre 53 years ago in Taiwan.

"Too many people died then. We will never forget it," Wu, now 81 years old, said.

Thoughts about the event and his six months in jail made it difficult for him to speak.

"They nearly beat me to death. Thank God, I survived," Wu, a Christian, said as he placed a yellow rose at the monument in Taipei that memorializes the victims of a 1947 massacre by Nationalist Chinese troops.

The numbers 2-28 are a cryptic reminder of Feb. 28, 1947. They represent the darkest chapter in the rule of the Kuomintang party on Taiwan. Only in recent years has the party begun to come to terms with the massacre. A few years ago, the mere mention of 2- 28 was forbidden on Taiwan.

But on Monday for only the third time, Taiwan's relatively new democracy observed the anniversary of the massacre that killed an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 Taiwanese. No one knows for sure the exact number of people who were slain by the marauding Chinese Nationalist troops. The massacre resulted in a "cleansing" of the Taiwanese intellectual elite.

To this day, the wounds remain deep and painful. The depth and intensity of the wounds was demonstrated on Monday by the self- immolation of a man near a 2-28 monument at Chiayi in central Taiwan. A suicide note in which the victim expressed his support for Taiwan independence from China and for a victory of the opposition candidate Chen Shui-bian in the March 18 presidential election was not something that happened by chance.

No other Taiwan politician has done more than Chen to reappraise the bloody massacre.

"Without Chen there wouldn't even be a monument," said one of the massacre's survivors, now 79 years old, whose brother was murdered during the bloodshed.

If Chen, a native Taiwanese and former lawyer for the down-and-out people of the island, simply had declared February 28 a day off from work when he was Taipei's mayor there probably never would have been a monument to commemorate the massacre. But Chen, who is now the leader of the Democratic Progressive Party, wanted more than just a day's holiday each year to commemorate the bloodletting of 1947.

Another man, Charlie Lin, is linked closely to the memorialization of the massacre.

"I came here from the United States because I must support him (Chen)," Lin, a 56-year-old broker from California, said on Monday. His father was abducted in 1947 by Kuomintang soldiers and, despite the payment of US$45,000 in ransom, was slain.

In the race for the Taiwan's second democratically elected president Chen appears to be running neck on neck with the other candidates, Vice President Lien Chan, a Kuomintang party member, and James Soong, an independent, who was formerly a high-level official of the party.

In 1995, Lee Teng-hui was the first Taiwan president to publicly express sorrow for the massacre and its victims.

Much to this day remains unexplained. Mass graves have only recently been exhumed. This much is known: After the surrender of the Japanese who had ruled Taiwan as a colony until 1945, the Nationalist Chinese came to the island led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. They were greeted at first with enthusiasm by the Taiwanese, but after Nationalist troops began to treat Taiwan like a captured territory suitable for plundering the situation changed.

Exploitation, corruption and economic decline heightened the tensions between the Taiwanese natives and the Nationalists from the mainland. A bloody incident on Feb. 27, 1947 triggered by the arrest of a woman street vendor set off a wave of protests. The next day, troops gunned down some demonstrators and the situation got out of control.

The island's governor, Chen Yi, said he was ready for a compromise solution, but he sent out a call for Nationalist troops to be sent from the mainland to Taiwan. The troops arrived on March 8, 1947 at Keelung. They started shooting almost from the beginning and left a trail of blood. Two years later, after the Nationalists lost the Chinese civil war to the Communists, Chiang Kai-shek and the rest of the Nationalists fled the mainland for Taiwan. The Nationalists ruled the island with terror and until 1987 with martial law.

Only in the 1990s did the light of democracy begin to shine on a dark chapter of Taiwan's history. History is a mirror and a window to the past, present and future says an inscription in the 2-28 museum.