To Lam has been public security minister since 2016 and has taken a hard line on human rights movements in the country.
Vietnam’s governing Communist Party has nominated the public security minister to be the next president, state media reported, months after his predecessor stepped down as part of a anticorruption crackdown.
On Saturday, the party’s central committee picked To Lam, 66, the Vietnam News Agency reported.
Lam has been public security minister since 2016 and has taken a hard line on human rights movements in the country.
In March, President Vo Van Thuong resigned after a little more than a year in office due to “violations” and “shortcomings”, the party said.
Thuong was the second president to quit in two years amid an anticorruption crackdown that has seen several senior politicians fired and top business leaders tried for fraud and corruption.
When he took office, Thuong said he was “determined to fight corruption”, and was believed to be close to party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong – who is seen as the most powerful figure in the country.
Thousands of people, including top officials and senior business leaders, have been caught up the country’s “blazing furnace” campaign against corruption, which has touched the highest echelons of Vietnamese politics and is led by Trong.
‘Violations and shortcomings’
Tran Thanh Man, 61, was also nominated as the new head of Vietnam’s National Assembly, state media said, becoming one of Vietnam’s four most powerful leaders.
Man succeeds Vuong Dinh Hue, who asked to step down last month because of “violations and shortcomings”.
The nominations have been accepted by the party’s central committee but will be officially voted in by the National Assembly, which is due to meet next week.
All top leadership “must be truly united, truly exemplary, wholehearted and devoted to the common cause”, the central committee said.
In April, a court in Vietnam sentenced a property tycoon to death for her role in a $12.5bn financial fraud case, the country’s largest on record.
Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, was found guilty of embezzlement, bribery and violations of banking rules at the end of a trial in Ho Chi Minh City.
Lan’s arrest in October 2022 was among the most high-profile in the continuing anticorruption drive that started in 2016 and has picked up pace since 2022.
Mass protests erupted in New Caledonia this week after France’s parliament voted to allow French residents who have lived in the Pacific Islands territory for 10 years or more to vote in provincial elections.
The French government has argued that these reforms uphold democracy in the archipelago. But local people – particularly those from the Indigenous Kanak community, who make up 40 percent of the islands’ population – fear this will undermine their efforts to win independence from France.
France deployed troops to New Caledonia’s ports and international airport, banned TikTok as the government imposed a state of emergency on May 16.
Anger among the Indigenous Kanak people has been simmering for weeks over plans to amend the French constitution, diluting a 1998 accord that limited voting rights.
Hundreds of heavily armed French marines and police on Saturday patrolled the capital, Noumea, where streets were filled with debris following several nights of looting, arson and armed clashes in which six people have died.
French officials have accused a pro-independence group known as CCAT of being behind the protests. Ten activists accused of organising the violence have been placed under house arrest, according to authorities.
New Caledonia has been French territory since colonisation in the late 1800s. Centuries on, politics remains dominated by debate about whether the islands should be part of France, autonomous or independent – with opinions split roughly along ethnic lines.
Hundreds of heavily armed marines and police patrol the French territory’s capital Noumea after a night of violence.
One more person has been killed in France’s Pacific Islands territory of New Caledonia as security personnel tried to restore order, taking the death toll from nearly a week of unrest and looting to six.
French security forces reported the sixth fatality on Saturday following armed clashes over France’s plan to impose new voting rules that could give tens of thousands of non-Indigenous residents voting rights.
The territory is “on a destructive path” warned local minister Vaimu’a Muliava on Saturday, telling those involved “you are only punishing yourselves”.
The person was killed in an exchange of fire at a barricade at Kaala-Gomen, in the north of the main island, a security official said, while two people were seriously injured.
Le Monde and other French media outlets said the person killed was a man and that his son was among the injured.
Two police officers were among those who died earlier this week in the unrest that has prompted the government in Paris to impose a state of emergency on the archipelago and rush in reinforcements for security services. Three other people – all Indigenous Kanaks – have also been killed.
Anger among the Indigenous Kanak people has been simmering for weeks over plans to amend the French constitution to allow people who have lived in New Caledonia for 10 years to vote in the territory’s provincial elections, diluting a 1998 accord that limited voting rights.
Hundreds of heavily armed French marines and police on Saturday patrolled the capital, Noumea, where streets were filled with debris.
Vehicles and buildings were burned in the city’s Magenta district, the AFP news agency reported, as residents reported hearing gunfire, the drone of helicopters and “massive explosions” overnight.
The violence has left an estimated 3,200 tourists and other travellers stranded inside or outside the archipelago by the closure of the international airport in Noumea.
French officials have accused a pro-independence group known as CCAT of being behind the protests. Ten activists accused of organising the violence have been placed under house arrest, according to authorities.
CCAT on Friday called for “a time of calm to break the spiral of violence”.
New Caledonia has been French territory since colonisation in the late 1800s. Centuries on, politics remains dominated by debate about whether the islands should be part of France, autonomous or independent – with opinions split roughly along ethnic lines.
France has also accused the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan of interference in the territory. Azerbaijan, which has traditionally had little presence in the Asia Pacific and is nearly 14,000km (8,700 miles) away from New Caledonia, has denied the allegations.
A new day breaks to the rhythmic shuffling of bare feet upon the ground.
Like an apparition from centuries past, a procession of several hundred shaven-headed monks emerges through the dawn mist, snaking its way through the sleepy narrow streets. Buddhist locals line the route to make their daily offerings of rice and fruit as the monks file by with their alms bowls. Then, as silently as they appeared, the monks disappear back inside their temple walls, their saffron robes billowing softly behind them.
A monk rushes to dawn prayers and meditation at one of the hundreds of Buddhist temples in Luang Prabang, Laos [Jack Picone/Al Jazeera]
This dawn ritual in Luang Prabang is just one aspect of life that lends the small city its ethereal, forgotten air. Located in the country of Laos, 370km (229 miles) northwest of the capital, Vientiane, Luang Prabang lies in a beautiful valley at the confluence of the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers.
That, during parts of the 20th century, the borders of Laos were sealed to foreigners, combined with its shimmering temples and ancient religious aura, has ensured the town has remained one of the most cloistered, unspoiled places on the planet.
The launches come a day after the United States and South Korea conducted joint fighter jet drills.
North Korea has test-fired short-range “ballistic missiles” towards the Sea of Japan, the South Korean military said a day after it conducted joint drills with the United States using stealth fighter jets to simulate air combat.
In a brief statement on Friday, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the launches were made from North Korea’s eastern coast region of Wonsan and that the country had bolstered its surveillance posture and was maintaining readiness.
The statement did not provide further details of the latest launches but added that an analysis was under way.
On Thursday, two South Korean F-35As and two US F-22 Raptors conducted aerial exercises over the central region of South Korea. Such drills infuriate North Korea, which views them as rehearsals for invasion.
While the South’s military did not specify the latest type of weapon, North Korean state media reported that its military has been testing multiple launch rocket systems that are being upgraded.
North Korea also denounced a plan by South Korea and the US to stage joint annual military exercises in August, warning they could face a “catastrophic aftermath” if the drills are carried out. It described them as a “nuclear attack exercise”.
“This clearly shows that Washington’s claim that it has no hostile intent is nothing but a deceptive hypocrisy,” according to a statement published by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
Banned tests
In late April, North Korea fired a 600mm “super-large warhead” towards the same area.
North Korea is barred by multiple United Nations sanctions from any tests using ballistic technology, but its key ally Russia used its UN Security Council veto in March to effectively end UN monitoring of violations.
The UN panel of experts was investigating allegations that North Korea was transferring weapons to Moscow, with South Korea claiming in March that some 7,000 containers of arms had been sent to Russia for use in Ukraine since around July 2023.
Earlier on Friday, Kim’s powerful sister Kim Yo Jong said the country’s tactical weapons were intended as a deterrent against South Korean military aggression and denied it exports weapons.
The US and experts have said North Korea is seeking a range of military assistance from Russia in return, such as satellite technology and upgrading its Soviet-era military equipment.
North Korea said last week it would equip its military with a new 240mm multiple rocket launcher this year, adding that a “significant change” for the army’s artillery combat capabilities was under way.
The incident took place in the southern state of Johor in the early hours of Friday morning.
Two police officers have been killed and one injured in Malaysia after a man suspected to be part of the hardline Jemaah Islamiyah group stormed a police station.
The attack took place in the early hours of Friday morning in the town of Ulu Tiram in the southern state of Johor as police on duty dealt with a couple who had said they wanted to make a statement about a two-year-old incident, Inspector General of Police Razarudin Husain was quoted as saying in the New Straits Times newspaper.
While the group was talking the suspect arrived at the back of the station on a motorcycle, armed with a machete.
When an officer confronted the man, he lashed out with the machete, grabbing the policeman’s service revolver to shoot dead the second officer.
Razarudin said investigators suspected the man, who was shot dead by a third officer who was injured after being slashed with the machete, was planning to seize weapons for a “yet to be determined agenda”.
Razaurdin told Malaysian media that police raided the suspect’s house, not far from the police station, and found “numerous JI-related paraphernalia”. Five members of his family were arrested, including the suspect’s 62-year-old father who police said was a “known JI member”. The two people who were lodging the police report were also detained.
Other members of JI living in the state, which borders Singapore, were also being arrested, the Malay Mail news outlet quoted Razarudin as saying.
Jemaah Islamiyah is an al-Qaeda-affiliated group that aimed to establish a hardline Islamic state in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia.
At its height in the 2000s, JI was alleged to have members from Indonesia to Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia and the Philippines, and masterminded a series of deadly bombings, including the October 2002 attack in Bali that killed more than 200 people.
Some of its most prominent leaders were Malaysian, including Noordin Muhammad Top who acted as a recruiter, strategist and financier for the group and was wanted for involvement in a string of attacks in Indonesia.
Noordin was from Johor and was reported to have founded a religious school in Ulu Tiram.
JI is banned in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.
Some 1,000 security personnel have arrived from France to address the worst unrest in the territory since the 1980s.
Authorities in New Caledonia have described the situation in the French Pacific territory as “calmer” after Paris declared a state of emergency in response to violence that erupted on Monday night over plans to change provincial voting rules.
The officer of the high commissioner of New Caledonia, which represents the French state, said in a statement on Friday that unrest in the provincial capital Noumea had subsided, as hundreds of security reinforcements arrived from Paris.
“For the first time since Monday, the situation is calmer and more peaceful in greater Noumea,” the commission said in a statement.
However, there had been fires at a school and two businesses overnight, it added.
A resident speaks to a motorist at a temporary barricade to their neighbourhood in Noumea, as the city remains on edge [Theo Rouby/AFP]
Anger has been simmering for weeks over French plans to expand the vote in New Caledonia to outsiders who have lived on the island for 10 years or more, in a relaxation of voting restrictions agreed upon after an earlier period of political unrest in the 1980s.
The Indigenous Kanak population, who make up about 40 percent of the population, fear the move, which was adopted by the National Assembly in Paris on Wednesday, will dilute their vote and political influence.
About 1,000 extra security personnel are expected in New Caledonia, adding to the 1,700 already there, while authorities have said they will push for “the harshest penalties for rioters and looters”. Five people suspected of organising the unrest, which saw roads barricaded, businesses set on fire and looting, were placed under house arrest on Thursday.
At least five people have been killed since the violence broke out on Monday after a second police officer was killed on Thursday. Three civilians, all Kanaks, have also died, while hundreds of people have been injured.
The violence is the worst in the territory in more than 30 years and follows three failed referendums on independence that were part of earlier political agreements to ensure stability. The last referendum in December 2021 was boycotted by Kanak independence groups because it took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, and turnout was only 44 percent.
Some 1,000 more security personnel have been sent from France to help deal with the unrest in New Caledonia [Manon Cruz/Reuters]
Independence remains a popular cause in the territory, which lies between Australia and Fiji and was colonised by the French in the late 19th century.
The state of emergency, which includes a nighttime curfew and a ban on gatherings, will remain in force for 12 days.
Phnom Penh, Cambodia – Cambodia is pushing for an infrastructural renaissance, but it will need some help from its friends abroad to chip away at an estimated price tag of $36.6bn.
That was the final sum calculated by the Cambodian government and published earlier this year in a 174-project master plan that would overhaul the national transportation and logistics network within an ambitious timeframe of just a decade.
The goal to crisscross the kingdom with expressways, high-speed rail lines and other works fits closely with the state’s longstanding wish of becoming an upper-middle-income country in 2030 and a high-income nation by 2050.
Since the unopposed ascension last year of Prime Minister Hun Manet – the son of former Prime Minister Hun Sen, the country’s leader of nearly 40 years – his new government of aspiring technocrats has pressed forward with the building campaign, beseeching foreign allies for closer ties and increased investment while assuring the public of big things to come.
“We shall not withdraw from setting our targets in building road and bridge infrastructure,” Hun Manet said at a February groundbreaking for a Phnom Penh bridge funded with a Chinese loan.
“Roads are like blood vessels to feed the organs wherever it goes … soon we will have the ability not only to just possess [material things] but also for Cambodians to build by themselves infrastructural marvels such as bridges, highways and subways.”
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet has embarked on a major infrastructure drive [Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters]
Cambodia has experienced more than two decades of rapid economic growth with some of the worst infrastructure in Southeast Asia, according to the World Bank’s logistics performance index.
With the bank predicting accelerating gross domestic product (GDP) growth for the years ahead, Cambodia’s already stretched transportation system could be strained to breaking point.
While the new prime minister looks to cement his own status after his father’s long rule, making progress on hard infrastructure will present a test for his governance as well as the traditional Cambodian balancing act of international relations.
Rolling out the master plan with a to-do list of projects large and small could present an opportunity to benefit from geopolitical rivalries as foreign partners jostle for influence – especially as competition intensifies between two of its largest benefactors, China and Japan.
“I think Cambodia’s government feels it is high time to maximise whatever they can get from the donors,” Chhengpor Aun, a research fellow at Future Forum, a Cambodian public policy think tank, told Al Jazeera.
“It’s logical that if an infrastructure project initiated by the Cambodian government is not accepted by a partner, they could still go to the other partner to fund it. It’s strategic and flexible in the way they play the big powers against themselves to try to extract benefits.”
The Cambodian government and private businesses do fund infrastructure projects in the kingdom, but China and Japan together account for much of that investment.
Both are also the only countries to hold Cambodia’s highest diplomatic designation of “comprehensive strategic partnership”, a status Japan gained just last year.
So far, China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has led the infrastructure charge with major projects such as the kingdom’s first expressway, which runs from the inland capital of Phnom Penh to the coastal city of Sihanoukville.
Meanwhile, Japan has kept its own steady agenda, focusing on a range of projects such as new wastewater treatment facilities and upgrades to existing roads.
Perhaps most notable is a Japanese-led expansion that could more than triple the capacity of the international deep sea port of Sihanoukville, the sole facility of its kind in Cambodia.
The bustling facility handles about 60 percent of the country’s import and export traffic and is increasingly congested after more than a decade of steady growth.
Under the oversight of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), crews at the port broke ground on the expansion late last year.
The planned three-part, decade-long project is included in the new master plan and has a total estimated cost of about $750m.
Sihanoukville port handles about 60 percent of Cambodia’s import and export traffic [Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP]
“Compared with Chinese [infrastructure] investment, the amount of Japanese investment is very limited,” Ryuichi Shibasaki, an associate professor and researcher of global logistics at the University of Tokyo who has studied Cambodia’s shipping industry, told Al Jazeera.
“We need to find niche markets since there is so much investment from China, to fill the gaps or adjust investment to a more broad viewpoint.”
In recent years, the BRI has tightened its focus.
Accusations of China ensnaring poorer countries in “debt traps” have caused Beijing to turn away from issuing large loans to countries to fund megaprojects – typically defined as those worth more than $1bn – in favour of a more investment-oriented tilt towards projects with good expected returns.
These are typically funded with “build-operate-transfer” agreements, in which the company overseeing the work takes on the expense of developing it in return for the revenues generated by the finished project over a predetermined period.
At the end of the agreement, which can span decades, ownership transfers to the government of the host country.
Key pieces of Cambodia’s big-picture vision will depend on that kind of financing.
‘Trying to be Cambodia’s best friend’
The kingdom’s master plan for infrastructure includes proposals for nine megaprojects worth an estimated total of more than $19.1bn.
While most of these are still being studied for feasibility, almost all have been touched at some point by JICA or the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC), a subsidiary of the state-owned giant China Communications Construction Company.
CRBC previously led the construction of Cambodia’s first expressway, which came online in late 2022 and has generally been hailed as a success.
The company broke ground last year on a second, $1.35bn expressway between Phnom Penh and Bavet, a city on the Vietnamese border, which is among the nine envisaged megaprojects.
It is joined by such works as another CRBC-studied expressway system that would link Phnom Penh to the major tourism hub of Siem Reap and the city of Poipet on the Thai border.
Split into two parts, construction of that road system is estimated at a total expense of $4bn. There is also an upgrade of one existing railway line to Poipet to accommodate high-speed trains for $1.93bn, plus another to Sihanoukville for $1.33bn.
The plan later calls for a light rail and subway system for the capital Phnom Penh and part of Siem Reap, all packaged together for an estimated $3.5bn.
Shipping projects also feature heavily in the plan.
The largest of these is a 180-kilometre-long, 100-metre-wide shipping canal to link the Mekong River system at Phnom Penh directly to the Gulf of Thailand. The $1.7bn channel would bypass the current, less convenient river shipping route that runs the length of the Mekong through Vietnam.
The canal is currently being studied by CRBC for its economic feasibility.
Though little detail has yet come out from that process and no company has signed an official deal to actually build the project, the Cambodian government has announced it will break ground by the end of this year.
The magnitude of the proposal, and the government’s urgency to make it a reality, has caught positive attention from the logistics industry while raising ecological concerns for its potential effects on the transboundary river system.
Poor communication with the public on the details has left residents along the proposed route confused and apprehensive of their ability to stay in their homes.
The canal itself is expected by the Mekong-focused think tank Stimson Center to negatively impact a key floodplain that spans important agricultural regions of Cambodia and Vietnam.
The Cambodian government has proposed the construction of a light rail and subway system in the capital Phnom Penh at a cost of $3.5bn [Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP]
Hong Zhang, a China public policy postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center, said the momentum of the project could see it through regardless of the concerns.
“If the project has a very strong political backing, I don’t think environmental and social impacts would be in the way or prevent it from happening,” Zhang told Al Jazeera.
Zhang added that Cambodia’s relative political and macroeconomic stability – plus its government’s pro-China stance – has likely afforded it options that other countries would not necessarily get.
“Cambodia continues to be a relatively trouble-free market for Chinese engagement compared to many other countries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka or even Laos,” she said.
“Even if [the canal] not going to be economically feasible but seems to have good value in terms of its public utility, a lot of externality, this kind of project will be quite legitimate for them to still go back to the old model of borrowing from China with concessional loans, building it and then the government pays back the loan.”
Even if not all the projects in the master plan come to pass, those in the national logistics and transportation industry see a lot to like.
Matthew Owen, the project development executive for the Phnom Penh office of the Singapore-based shipping agency Ben Line Integrated Logistics, said the plan has major potential, but its success will depend on Cambodia’s ability to simultaneously improve the value of its exports.
“I don’t think it’s ‘build it and they will come’, but I think [the government] is ahead of their time,” Owen told Al Jazeera. “Having everything there means they’re going to be able to draw more people in to invest and do business.”
The scramble for large-scale public works is matched with a drive for more private-sector engagement as well, according to Owen.
Owen said the new Cambodian government has been urging international investors from across Asia to get moving on projects initiated before last year’s political handover.
“Everybody’s got an influence, everybody’s got something to gain, and it balances the influence from China,” he said.
“It’s not even a competition, it’s like a pool of countries trying to be Cambodia’s best friend. Cambodia is open to whatever country that’s open to making Cambodia better – if they want to have their own competition of who can build the biggest bridge, go for it.”
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.
People attend the commemoration of the February 28 Incident in Taipei [Violet Law/Al Jazeera]
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.”
The Transitional Justice Committee recommended the relocation of Chiang Kai-shek statues from public areas, but many remain [File: Ritchie B Tongo/EPA]
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.
Chiang Kai-shek (centre) in 1955. Known as ‘Generalissimo’, he led a brutal military dictatorship that only ended in 1992 [Fred Waters/AP Photo]
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.”
Thousands of new recruits have joined Myanmar’s rebel army in the jungle after rejecting the military’s new conscription laws. Al Jazeera went inside Myanmar to film with volunteers who are risking their lives to fight the junta.
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