World
Taiwan grapples with divisive history as new president prepares for power
Taipei, Taiwan – Even as Taiwan prepares for the inauguration of its eighth president next week, it continues to struggle over the legacy of the island’s first president, Chiang Kai-shek.
To some, Chiang was the “generalissimo” who liberated the Taiwanese from the Japanese colonisers. To 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 duelling narratives have divided Taiwan’s society and a recent push for transitional justice only seems to have deepened the fault lines. Now, the division is raising concern about whether it might affect Taiwan’s ability to mount a unified defence against China, which has become increasingly assertive in its claim over the self-ruled island.
“There is a concern when push comes to shove if the civilians 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 Taiwan natives, killing as many as 28,000 people in what became known as the February 28 Incident. In the four-decade-long martial law era that followed, thousands more perished.
This traumatic history met its official reckoning in 2018, when the Taiwan government set up its Transitional Justice Commission modelled after truth and reconciliation initiatives in Africa, Latin America and North America to redress historical human rights abuses and other atrocities.
When the commission concluded in May 2022, however, advocates and observers said they had seen little truth and hardly any reconciliation.
Almost from the first days of the commission, the meting-out of transitional justice became politicised across the blue-versus-green demarcation that has long defined Taiwan’s sociopolitical landscape, with blue representing KMT supporters and green the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
A recently published anthology entitled Ethics of Historical Memory: From Transitional Justice to Overcoming the Past explains how the way Taiwanese remember the past shapes how they think about transitional justice. And as that recollection is determined by which camp they support, each champions their own version of Taiwan’s history.
“That’s why transitional justice seems so stagnant now,” explained Jimmy Chia-Shin Hsu, research professor at the legal research institute Academia Sinica who contributed to and edited the book. “Whatever truth it uncovers would be mired in the blue-green narrative.”
A non-partisan view, Hsu said, is to credit the DPP with codifying transitional justice and Lee Teng-hui, the first democratically elected KMT president, with breaking the taboo on broaching the February 28 Incident.
The past shaping the future
In February, Betty Wei attended the commemoration for the February 28 incident for the first time and listened intently to the oral history collected from the survivors. Wei, 30, said she wanted to learn more about what happened because her secondary school textbook had brushed over what many consider a watershed event in a few cryptic lines, and many of her contemporaries showed little interest.
“In recent years the voices pushing for transitional justice have grown muted,” Wei told Al Jazeera. “A lot of people in my generation think the scores are for previous generations to settle.”
In Taiwan, the past is never past, and rather it is fodder for new fights.
As the DPP gears up for an unprecedented third consecutive term, the unfinished business of removing the island’s remaining statues of Chiang has resurfaced as the latest front in what Yang, the historian, described to Al Jazeera as “this memory war”.
More than half of the initial 1,500 monuments have been taken down over the past two years, with the remaining statues mostly on military installations.
Yang argues that is because the top brass rose through the ranks under martial law and many still regard Chiang as their leader, warts and all. For them, toppling the statues would be an attack on their history.
The statues embody “the historical legacy the military wants to keep alive,” Yang said. “That’s a source of tension between the military and the DPP government.”
On the eve of William Lai Ching-te taking his oath as the island’s next president, Taiwanese will for the first time mark the “White Terror Memorial Day” on May 19, the day when martial law was declared in 1949.
While it is clear Taiwanese have promised to never forget, whom and how to forgive has become far murkier.
As the former chairman of the Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation, the first NGO advocating for the cause, Cheng-Yi Huang lauded the government’s move to take over the KMT’s private archives in recent years but lamented there had been too little truth-seeking so far.
For example, under the February 28 Incident Disposition and Compensation Act, Huang said many have chosen to stay silent about their complicity because only victims get compensation.
However, Taiwan’s tumultuous history means the line between victim and victimiser is rarely clear-cut.
By digging into military archives, Yang has shed light on how Chinese were kidnapped and pressed into service by the KMT in the last years of the Chinese Civil War. Those who tried to flee were tortured and even murdered. And the native Taiwanese who rose up to resist KMT’s suppression 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 has missed the opportunity to reconcile Taiwanese society with the military.”
To Hsu, Beijing’s belligerence demands Taiwanese of all stripes find a common cause.
“As we’re facing the threat from the Chinese Communist Party, it’s imperative that we unite in forging a collective future,” said Hsu, to a standing-room-only book talk during the Taipei International Book Exhibition in late February.
“And how we remember our past will shape this future of ours.”
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
World
Iranian protesters rename Tehran street after Trump, plead ‘don’t let them kill us’ amid crackdown
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Iranian protesters intensified nationwide demonstrations over the past 24 hours, directly appealing to President Donald Trump while chanting anti-regime slogans. Footage published Wednesday showed a protester in Tehran symbolically renaming a street after Trump, while other videos captured handwritten appeals reading, “Don’t let them kill us,” Iran International reported.
Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, posted the video on X stating, “Since Trump’s comments about the Iran protests, I’ve seen numbers videos of Iranian protesters either thanking him or, in this case, renaming streets after the US president.”
The appeals came as demonstrators faced a widening security crackdown, including the deployment of armed units and tear gas near major civilian sites in Tehran.
TRUMP SIGNS ‘MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN’ HAT ALONGSIDE LINDSEY GRAHAM
Exiled Iranian opposition leader Reza Pahlavi said the current unrest represents a historic opportunity to end Iran’s Islamic Republic.
“In all these years, I’ve never seen an opportunity as we see today in Iran,” Pahlavi said in an interview aired Tuesday on “Hannity.”
“Iranian people are more than ever committed to bringing an end to this regime, as the world has witnessed in the last few days, the level of demonstrations is unprecedented in Iran,” he said.
Pahlavi said protests have spread to more than 100 cities and emphasized the role of Iran’s traditional merchant class, describing developments inside the country’s bazaars as a turning point. “We are beginning to see more and more defections,” Pahlavi said, adding that “Either way, the regime is crumbling and is very close to collapsing.”
IRAN ON THE BRINK AS PROTESTERS MOVE TO TAKE TWO CITIES, APPEAL TO TRUMP
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., posted a photo of himself posing with President Donald Trump, who is holding a signed “Make Iran Great Again” hat. (Lindsey Graham / X)
Over the past 24 hours, Iran International reported continued protests and strikes across the country, including in Tehran, Tabriz, Qazvin, Kermanshah, Kerman, Shiraz, Falavarjan and Bandar Abbas. Tehran’s Grand Bazaar remained a focal point of unrest, with large crowds chanting against Iran’s leadership as authorities responded with tear gas and armed deployments.
Security operations expanded into sensitive civilian locations. Videos published by Iran International showed tear gas used near or inside Tehran’s Sina Hospital and the Plasco Shopping Center.
Protesters hold signs during a demonstration in Iran amid ongoing unrest, according to images released by the Iranian opposition group National Council of Resistance of Iran. (NCRI )
Casualty and arrest figures continued to rise. The Human Rights Activists News Agency, cited by Iran International on Wednesday, reported at least 36 people killed since protests began, including 34 protesters and two members of Iran’s security forces, with more than 2,000 arrests nationwide. Iranian authorities have not released updated official figures.
New footage from the past day showed demonstrators lighting fires in the streets of Shiraz and chanting “Death to Khamenei,” referring to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. In Qazvin, protesters were heard chanting, “Law enforcement, return to the side of the nation.”
Iranian protesters try to take control of two cities in western Iran as nationwide unrest continues, with demonstrators chanting ‘Death to Khamenei’ in the streets. (Getty)
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Workers also joined the unrest, with strikes reported at the South Pars gas refinery and widespread shop closures at major markets in Tehran and Tabriz.
For the past year, staying in Donald Trump’s good graces has become a top priority for European leaders, who have gone the extra mile to appease the mercurial US president, rein in his most radical impulses and keep him firmly engaged in what is their be-all and end-all: Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Though Europe is by far the largest donor to Kyiv, nobody on the continent is under the illusion that the invasion can be resisted without US-made weapons and come to an eventual end without Washington at the negotiating table.
In practice, the strategic calculus has translated into painful sacrifices, most notably the punitive tariffs that Trump forced Europeans to endure.
“It’s not only about the trade. It’s about security. It is about Ukraine. It is about current geopolitical volatility,” Maroš Šefčovič, the European Commissioner for Trade, said in June as he defended the trade deal that imposed a sweeping 15% tariff on EU goods.
The same thinking is now being replicated in the saga over Greenland’s future.
As the White House ramps up its threats to seize the vast semi-autonomous island, including, if necessary, by military force, Europeans are walking an impossibly thin line between their moral imperative to defend Denmark’s territorial integrity and their deep-rooted fear of risking Trump’s wrath.
The precarity of the situation was laid bare at this week’s meeting of the “Coalition of the Willing” in Paris, which French President Emmanuel Macron convened to advance the work on security guarantees for Ukraine.
The high-profile gathering was notable because of the first-ever in-person participation of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the chief negotiators appointed by Trump.
At the end of the meeting, Macron hailed the “operational convergence” achieved between Europe and the US regarding peace in Ukraine. By his side, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was equally sanguine, speaking of “excellent progress”.
But it did not take long for the elephant in the room to make an appearance.
Hard pivot
The first journalist who took the floor asked Macron whether Europe could “still trust” America in light of the threats against Greenland. In response, the French president quickly highlighted the US’s participation in the security guarantees.
“I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of that commitment,” Macron said. “As a signatory of the UN charter and a member of NATO, the United States is here as an ally of Europe, and it is, as such, that it has worked alongside us in recent weeks.”
Starmer was also put on the spot when a reporter asked him about the value of drafting security guarantees for a country at war “on the very day” that Washington was openly talking about seizing land from a political ally.
Like Macron, Starmer chose to look at the bright side of things.
“The relationship between the UK and the US is one of our closest relationships, particularly on issues of defence, security and intelligence,” the British premier said. “And we work with the US 24/7 on those issues.”
Starmer briefly referred to a statement published earlier on Tuesday by the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the UK and Denmark in defence of Greenland.
The statement obliquely reminded the US to uphold “the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders” enshrined in the UN Charter – precisely the same tenets that Moscow is violating at large in Ukraine.
The text did not contain any explicit condemnation of the goal to forcefully annex Greenland and did not spell out any potential European retaliation.
“Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland,” its closing paragraph read.
Conspicuous silence
The lack of censure was reminiscent of the European response to the US operation that just a few days earlier removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela.
Besides Spain, which broke ranks to denounce the intervention as a blatant breach of international law, Europeans were conspicuously silent on legal matters. Rather than condemn, they focused on Venezuela’s democratic transition.
Privately, officials and diplomats concede that picking up a fight with Trump over Maduro’s removal, a hostile dictator, would have been counterproductive and irresponsible in the midst of the work to advance security guarantees for Ukraine.
The walking-on-eggs approach, however, is doomed to fail when it comes to Greenland, a territory that belongs to a member of both the EU and NATO.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has warned that the entire security architecture forged at the end of World War II, which allies have repeatedly invoked to stand up to the Kremlin’s neo-imperialism, would collapse overnight in the event of an annexation. The worry is that trying to stay in Trump’s good graces at all costs might come at an unthinkable price.
“Europeans are clearly in a ‘double-bind’: Since they are in desperate need of US support in Ukraine, their responses to US actions – whether on Venezuela or Trump threatening Denmark to annex Greenland – are weak or even muted,” said Markus Ziener, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
“Europeans are afraid that criticising Trump could provide a pretext for the US president to conclude a peace deal at Ukraine’s and Europe’s expense. Is this creating a credibility gap on the part of the EU? Of course. But confronted with a purely transactional US president, there seems to be no other way.”
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