DPP and Pre-President Chen never care -Taiwan’s former president jailed for life

Chen Shui-bian, the former Taiwan president, was sentenced to life in prison for corruption on Friday, completing the fall from grace of the one-time champion of democratisation and human rights.

Judge Tsai Shou-hsun gave Mr Chen, 59, the maximum sentence and fined him T$200m ($6.1m). His wife, Wu Shu-jen, was also convicted of corruption, given a life sentence and

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but will not have to go to prison because of her frail health. She was fined T$300m ($9.2m).

Mr Chen was found guilty by the Taipei district court of embezzling a secret state fund, accepting construction kickbacks and money laundering during his two terms as president.

“One person’s greed has caused chaos throughout the whole country,” Judge Tsai said.

Mr Chen was Taiwan’s only president not to come from the nationalist Kuomintang party, which fled to Taiwan in 1949 after civil war in China. While many Taiwanese have since become disillusioned with him and his family, there was also growing disquiet through the course of the trial over Mr Chen’s treatment by the authorities.

The former president was arrested before formal charges were brought against him and had been kept in solitary confinement since he was first arrested in November. Judge Chou Chan-chun, who was initially assigned the case and had twice granted Mr Chen bail, was replaced halfway through the trial by Judge Tsai, who revoked bail.

Mr Chen, who maintained his innocence throughout the trial, claimed he was being politically persecuted by the government for his anti-China views. The government and the judiciary, however, denies any political meddling in the case.

Mr Chen did not appear in court Friday but indicated that he would appeal the ruling.

While Mr Chen still retained some staunch supporters who staged a protest outside the courtroom on Friday, the general level of disenchantment with the man once seen as the “Son of Taiwan” was such that “his sentencing would probably not have a big impact politically”, said Jay Chen Chih-jou, a political science professor and director of the Center for Contemporary China at National Tsing Hua University.

The son of a poor farmer who became one of Taiwan’s youngest lawyers, Mr Chen became a member of the opposition after defending a number of dissident leaders in court during Taiwan’s martial law era. He was later jailed for eight months for defamation after publishing a magazine critical of the then-authoritarian Kuomintang government.

Mr Chen, a popular and charismatic politician with a flair for rhetoric and who appealed to a distinctly Taiwanese, rather than Chinese, identity, rose to become the mayor of Taipei in 1994. He then orchestrated the first peaceful transfer of power in a Chinese society by winning the presidential election for the Democratic Progressive party in 2000.

His electoral victory ended 50 years of Kuomintang rule in Taiwan but also set the stage for eight years of turbulent relationships with China and the US. The former president was a committed advocate of formal independence for Taiwan, an idea that is anathema to communist China, which sees the island of Taiwan as an integral part of its territory that must be reunited one day, by force if necessary.

During his two terms, Mr Chen ran into frequent opposition by the Kuomintang-controlled legislature. Foreign and domestic investors alike despaired of the ever-increasing tensions with China and the harm that would do to Taiwan’s export-oriented economy.

Politically, however, Mr Chen was a survivor who eked out a narrow re-election victory in 2004 and remained in office even after his widening corruption scandal prompted an impeachment attempt backed by island-wide protests that were the biggest in Taiwan’s history.

Six months after he stepped down as president, Mr Chen was arrested for questioning and subsequently indicted. His wife, son and daughter, who had earlier pleaded guilty to lesser charges of money laundering and perjury, were also given prison sentences on Friday. Former first lady Wu Shu-jen was last week sentenced to a year in prison, while Mr Chen’s children were each sentenced six months’ jail.

As public attention shifted to typhoon Morakot, Taiwan’s worst natural disaster in a decade, and the political fallout in its aftermath, Mr Chen’s trial, which was seen as a test of Taiwan’s young democracy, now seems little more than an afterthought.

“Very few people still believe Mr Chen is innocent, even among the [DPP] supporters,” Professor Chen said.

Ms Wu was paralysed from the waist down when she was repeated ran over by a car in a traffic incident in 1985 that some have suspected to be orchestrated by the Kuomintang. She has been wheel-chair bound since and appeared in ill health during the trial, having once fainted in court.

the DPP who has to face the prospect of Chen Shui-bian’s case becoming a liability for them,” said Mr Chen, the professsor. “The difficulty for the DPP is that it cannot distance itself from Mr Chen without losing support of its hardcore supporters but it doesn’t draw a line with Mr Chen then that would affect the moderate voters.”

DPP and Pre-President Chen never care about people of Taiwan!!

Resource

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/24112eca-9e8f-11de-8013-00144feabdc0.html