Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: rheins/WikiCommons/CC BY 3.0
THE CONTROL YUAN has called for justice over the massacre of 20 unarmed civilians by the ROC military in 1987, 37 years ago.
The incident, referred to as the “37 Incident” or “March 7th Incident”, because it took place on March 7th, 1987. A vessel with twenty Vietnamese refugees onboard was destroyed by missiles. 66 missiles were fired. Previously, warning shots had been fired, but the boat still was drifting by Kinmen.
Three individuals who came ashore seeking refuge were shot to death, including two men and one woman. The woman was pregnant and one of the men was shot while kneeling and begging for mercy.
Subsequently, the vessel was boarded by soldiers, and all onboard were shot, which included several children and elderly individuals. Those killed were buried on the spot, to destroy evidence. However, according to the Control Yuan’s investigation, wild dogs dug up the bodies several times, resulting in their being reburied two or three times. At present, where the bodies are is unknown. All of those onboard the boat were of ethnic Chinese descent.
Such actions were carried out by the 158th Division of the Lieyu garrison on Kinmen. Subsequent investigations by military courts were criticized as perfunctory, in not accessing the reports from the time the incident took place, as well as regarding the Hong Kong government regarding the expulsion of the Vietnamese refugees. Key details regarding how the refugees were shot were left out of the report. Jail sentences handed out were light.
Four military personnel were sentenced to between 20 and 22 months in prison in December 1988, but their sentences were suspended, with the Ministry of National Defense (MND) maintaining the soldiers were merely acting in accordance with their duties.
The incident took place in the twilight days of the authoritarian period, which is one of the reasons why details about the case are scarce. Cases of wrongdoing committed by the military or by the police, including the use of torture to extract confessions from suspects to force them to admit to crimes they did not commit, took place during this time.
The Control Yuan. Photo credit: Allentchang/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
And in cases of police or military wrongdoing, the response was more often to try and cover up such actions. Several prisoners on death row in Taiwan, such as Chiou Ho-shun, Taiwan’s longest-serving prisoner on death row, have verdicts that are thought to result from cover-ups in that the police extracted confessions through torture to avoid appearing as though they were unable to solve high-profile cases of violent crime, so as to produce a suspect.
Indeed, as an incident that took place in the last days of Taiwan’s authoritarian period, one notes that the truth has not been revealed about political killings that took place in a similar period. As such, the murderers of former DPP chair Lin Yi-hsiung’s family and of Carnegie Mellon professor Chen Wen-cheng are still officially unknown, even if it is generally thought that they were killed by the Taiwan Garrison Command.
The Control Yuan has been investigating the case for several years. Relatives of the deceased, such as Tran Quoc Dung, have traveled to Taiwan to seek truth and reconciliation. In the past, relatives of the deceased have stated that they are not here to blame Taiwan or its government, but that they hope for the truth, as well as that an unintended positive outcome of the incident was that they came to know better.
Even so, the MND has continued to assert that the actions of the soldiers were justified. This perhaps points to the image problems that the Taiwanese military continues to have, in that the military is unable to admit fault in the case of wrongdoing even when this leads to deaths, as with the death of cadet Hung Ching-chiu in 2013. It is thought that many young people have negative views of the Taiwanese military, including the role it plays in defense, because of such image problems.
To this extent, even if it would be unlikely for killings of refugees to take place in Taiwan today, Taiwan still lacks an asylum law and still often turns away refugees. This has affected individuals from a number of nationalities.
The “March 7th Incident”, then, stands at the juncture of several issues. This includes transitional justice, inclusive of past crimes committed by the ROC military and the military’s refusal to be accountable for such crimes in the present, as well as Taiwan’s poor treatment of refugees. It is to be seen whether there will be justice for such past actions.