Taiwan's Stolen Assets: Will the KMT Ever Own Up?
Sunday July 29, by Jerome F. Keating Ph.D.
Transitional Justice where is it in Taiwan? Has it ever come here? In the previous post we had seen how the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has gone on record to admit it has over NT$ 25,000,000,000 in assets, that is NT$25 billion (US$ 757,757,757.00 million). Its closest rival, the ruling party Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has barely about one per cent of that, it has approximately NT$ 250,000,000 in assets, or US$ 7.5 million. What explains this huge discrepancy? How does the main opposition have so much and all the other parties including the ruling party have so little? On Saturday July 28th, the Taiwan Thinktank sponsored the International Conference on the Comparative Studies of Transitional Justice to provide the answer.
Speakers at the conference represented a variety of countries that had suffered under Communist rule and had extreme need of transitional justice after World War II. Present were ministers and researchers from East Germany, Mongolia, Poland, Lithuania, and Hungary. Each country had its own specific problems and situations with crimes and human rights violations following World War II, but the one thing they all had in common was that the controlling Communist Party in each country had confiscated the majority of the state assets. Further the Communists strove desperately to hang onto those state assets and not return them to the people. Dr. h.c. Lothar de Maiziere, the former Prime Minister of East Germany was the keynote speaker.
At the end of the conference, after hearing the litany of countries that had had to fight tooth and nail for transitional justice and that had to pry their state assets from their Communist rulers, one supreme irony stood out. One would expect the confiscation, stealing and control of state assets by Communists but what about Taiwan? Here was a country where the then ruling party, the KMT, was pledged to the Three Principles of democracy and Sun Yat-sen. Ironically the KMT was the greatest violator and the one that still resisted in returning the state assets to the people. The indicted former KMT chairperson, Ma Ying-jeou, had promised back in 2005 he would divest the party of its assets (note he did not say he would return them). Ma sold a few of the assets and put the money in the KMT treasury. Nothing more has been done.
Ma's party has, as was stated above, admitted to having unreturned assets 100 times greater than any assets possessed by any other party in Taiwan. This is what they admitted to, the records are still unavailable as to what assets they actually have and what assets were transferred to become the personal property of party members. Instead, the indicted Ma now wants the people to elect him president. He says he will lead the country to prosperity. Would you trust a man who already has and will not return over 27 billion dollars worth of your state assets? And now he wants you to trust him with more? Where is Transitional Justice in Taiwan? The Taiwan Thinktank's website is www.taiwanthinktank.org Hopefully they will make the proceedings available by disk to a larger audience.