Taipei, Taiwan – Even as Taiwan prepares for the inauguration of its eighth president next week, debate continues over the legacy of the island’s first president, Chiang Kai-shek.
For some, Chiang was the “generalissimo” who freed the Taiwanese from Japanese colonizers. For many others, he was the oppressor-in-chief who declared martial law and ushered in the period of White Terror that would last until 1992.
For decades, these conflicting narratives have divided Taiwanese society, and a recent push for transitional justice only appears to have deepened the divisions. Now the split is raising concerns about whether it could affect Taiwan’s ability to mount a unified defense against China, which has become increasingly assertive in its claim to the self-ruled island.
“There is a concern, when the time comes, for civilians to work well with the military to defend Taiwan,” said historian Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang of the University of Missouri in the United States.
On February 28, 1947, Chiang’s newly arrived Kuomintang (KMT) troops suppressed an uprising by native Taiwanese, killing some 28,000 people in what became known as the February 28 Incident. In the four decades of the martial law era that followed, thousands of people died.
This traumatic history received its official reckoning in 2018, when the Taiwanese government created its Transitional Justice Commission, inspired by truth and reconciliation initiatives in Africa, Latin America and North America, to redress historical abuses of human rights and other atrocities.
However, when the commission concluded in May 2022, advocates and observers said they saw little truth and almost no reconciliation.
Almost from the commission’s earliest days, the distribution of transitional justice became politicized through the blue versus green demarcation that has long defined Taiwan’s sociopolitical landscape, with blue representing KMT supporters and green the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). ) in the power.
A recently published anthology titled Ethics of Historical Memory: From Transitional Justice to Overcoming the Past explains how the way Taiwanese remember the past shapes the way they think about transitional justice. And as this memory is determined by the camp they support, each defends their own version of Taiwan’s history.
“This is why transitional justice seems so stagnant now,” explained Jimmy Chia-Shin Hsu, a research professor at legal research institute Academia Sinica, who contributed to and edited the book. “Any truth that is revealed would get bogged down in the blue and green narrative.”
A nonpartisan view, Hsu said, is to credit the DPP with codifying transitional justice and Lee Teng-hui, the KMT’s first democratically elected president, with breaking the taboo in addressing the February 28 Incident.
The past shaping the future
In February, Betty Wei participated for the first time in the commemoration of the February 28th incident and listened carefully to the oral history collected from the survivors. Wei, 30, said he wanted to know more about what happened because his high school textbook had covered what many consider a watershed in a few cryptic lines, and many of his contemporaries showed little interest.
“In recent years, voices pushing for transitional justice have been silenced,” Wei told Al Jazeera. “Many people of my generation think that the scores are up to previous generations to settle.”
In Taiwan, the past is never the past and, on the contrary, serves as fodder for new struggles.
As the DPP prepares for an unprecedented third consecutive term, the unfinished work of removing the remaining statues of Chiang from the island has re-emerged as the latest front in what Yang, the historian, described to Al Jazeera as “this war of memory ”.
More than half of the initial 1,500 monuments were demolished in the last two years, with the remaining statues mostly in military installations.
Yang argues this is because the upper echelons rose through the ranks under martial law and many still consider Chiang their leader, warts and all. For them, taking down the statues would be an attack on their history.
The statues embody “the historical legacy that the military wants to keep alive,” Yang said. “This is a source of tension between the military and the DPP government.”
On the eve of William Lai Ching-te being sworn in as the island’s next president, Taiwanese will mark “White Terror Memorial Day” for the first time on May 19, the day martial law was declared in 1949.
While it is clear that the Taiwanese promised never to forget, who and how to forgive has become much murkier.
As former president of the Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation, the first NGO to champion the cause, Cheng-Yi Huang praised the government’s decision to take control of the KMT’s private archives in recent years, but regretted that there had been too much little search for the truth, therefore distant.
For example, under the February 28 Incident Disposal and Compensation Law, Huang said many chose to remain silent about their complicity because only victims receive compensation.
However, Taiwan’s tumultuous history means that the line between victim and perpetrator is rarely clear.
By investigating military archives, Yang shed light on how Chinese people were kidnapped and forced into service by the KMT in the final years of the Chinese Civil War. Those who tried to escape were tortured and even murdered. And native Taiwanese who rose up to resist KMT repression were persecuted as communists.
“Under martial law, the military was seen as an arm of the dictatorship, but they were also victims of the dictator’s regime,” Yang told Al Jazeera. “The transitional justice movement missed the opportunity to reconcile Taiwanese society with the military.”
For Hsu, Beijing’s belligerence demands that Taiwanese of all stripes find common cause.
“As we face the threat from the Chinese Communist Party, it is imperative that we come together to forge a collective future,” said Hsu, in a stand-up book talk during the Taipei International Book Expo in late February.
“And how we remember our past will shape our future.”
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
