By Jerome A. Cohen
Taiwan’s Transitional Justice Commission’s newly-released report discusses the most infamous murder case committed during the long Kuomintang White Terror era – the 1980 killing of the mother and twin daughters of the courageous human rights activist Lin Yi-hsiung while Lin, Annette Lu and six others were being prosecuted for their December 10, 1979 Human Rights Day protest rally in Kaohsiung. The TJC notes that the destruction of evidence by the National Security Bureau of the Ministry of National Defense makes it difficult to reach firm conclusions about who was responsible for the murders (full report here).
Here it is important to recall the 1984 assassination of Henry Liu (劉宜良), whose pen name was Jiang Nan (江南), in San Francisco by Bamboo Union Gang leaders. That led to prosecution of the actual killers in Taiwan’s civilian courts and court martial of the military officials from the Ministry of National Defense who directed the assassination. I was among the auditors at the court martial and heard the defense of Admiral Wang, the head of the National Security Bureau and principal accused. He shocked the audience by his defense when he said, in effect: “You know, your honors, we didn’t do this thing. If we had, you would not have known about it. Ten or twenty years ago we used to do this kind of thing all the time and no one discovered it.”
The defense failed and Wang was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, but, being a longtime favorite of the Chiang Kaishek family, he was well-treated and later released. (My memoir video about the case is available here.)