“Do
not come to claim my body. I wish give it to the National Taiwan University
College of Medicine or medical training institute. When I was a student, I
learnt a lot of medical knowledge from practical autopsy. If this body can be
autopsied by students, to increase their medical knowledge, to contribute to their
medical knowledge, it would be much more meaningful.”
This except comes
from my grandfather’s last
letters, which were written to my grandmother before his execution in 1953. Unfortunately
his dying wish was not realized. These five letters were not given to his family,
but were filed with other documents and eventually sent into the National
Archives Administration. In 2008, once access to these documents became
possible, I began to apply for any papers related
to my grandfather and we saw copies of these letters for the first time.
However, by this time my grandmother was suffering with Alzheimer's, which
prevented her from learning that her husband had written letters to her 56
years previously.
Below I set out three appeals to the government,
which I ask as a family member of a political prisoner.
Firstly: The government should survey and return any
previously unreturned personal items automatically. This should not be left as
the responsibility of relatives to make a claim, but should be the government’s
responsibility to ensure they are returned. There may be many personal
letters and personal items that are still kept by the government, which the victim’s
families know nothing about. The Government should make a systemic survey of
any remaining items and return them as a matter of course.
Secondly: Files from every administration should
be better organised. A law about file transfer, after each administration is dissolved,
should be established. The present situation is that all files and documents from
every administration are filed in various locations and not sorted in one place. Information held about
the people involved in the arrests and trials of the political prisoners should
be published. It maybe that under current law we are unable to prosecute the
original military judges and secret police, but we should have the right
to know who did this. We want to know which cases were judged, and by whom, which
cases were investigated, and by whom. The government should publish these data
and exhibit them in a museum.
Thirdly: There should be a
real effort to admit the fault and make a proper apology. We do not need a
meaningless apology issued by a president or other unrelated individual. This
is an unusual situation, we only have victims but no perpetrator. I believe that
some of the people involved are still alive. I wish to hear someone publicly
apologize for what he
did; which case he judged or person he tortured,
and state clearly that this was wrong. My grandfather was a dentist who had studied
in Japan, he was arrested a few years after he had returned to Taiwan and
opened his clinic. The charge made by the Chinese Nationalist Party was rebellion and he was first sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. When
the document was sent to Chiang Kai-shek, he changed the sentence to death. This
decision to amend the sentence took my grandfather’s life. He was 33 years old.
We believe that excepting Chiang Kai-shek, there must be other participants
still alive. However, has anyone come to publicly apologize? Until now, nobody!
