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Chen treatment photos released on March 22, 2004 ……

SCOTCHING RUMORS: After suggestions by political opponents that the president's shooting was a stunt, the presidential office released more pictures and records.

By Lin Chieh-yu, STAFF REPORTER

The Presidential Office yesterday publicized evidence relating to the attempted assassination of President Chen Shui-bian Friday, on the eve of the presidential election, urging people not to believe rumors or indulge in empty speculation but wait for the investigative machinery of the legal system to produce results.

Explaining why photos of the president being treated for his gunshot wound in hospital were not made available on the day of the shooting, Presidential Office Spokesman James Huang said: "President Chen's first priority after the incident was to ensure national security and social stability, and the reason why these bloody photos were not publicized was because the government did not want to arouse supporters' irrational reactions."

"President Chen indicated that the presidential election should not be affected by the gunshot incident," Huang said. "If we did want to affect the election, we could have released the photos Friday night, which would absolutely have gained a lot of sympathy and affected voters' intentions.

"Therefore, the government appeals to the public to return to their normal lives and just allow the legal system to go ahead," Huang said.

The shooting occurred Friday afternoon, while Chen and Vice President Annette Lu stood side by side on a jeep leading a motorcade through Tainan City.

The pair were immediately escorted to the Chi Mei Medical Center in Tainan County. According to medical staff at the hospital the injuries were not life-threatening and the two remained conscious throughout their treatment.

The pan-blue camp, has however, questioned whether in fact the assassination attempt wasn't a stunt organized to get sympathy for Chen prior to the voting.

The pan-blues claim that voting should not have gone ahead on Saturday and that the election could have been postponed until the facts behind the assassination attempt could be clearly ascertained.

Independent lawmaker Sisy Chen, a DPP renegade working as an advisor to the pan-blue presidential candidate Lien Chan, held a press conference at the KMT's campaign headquarter at midnight Friday, saying that the hospital had faked the medical records of the president and Lu.

She suggested that the entire incident was a falsified event to try to sway voters. She claimed to have information from "an anonymous nurse" claiming "the national security system was involved in the conspiracy."

The DPP campaign's executive manager Su Tseng-chang condemned the allegations in the strongest terms, saying that such a attitude was "blindly unconscionable."

To further allay opposition parties' doubts about the incident, the Presidential Office yesterday publicized eight photos, showing the process of treatment of the president and the vice president.

The photos show President Chen being sutured on a hospital bed and Lu lying on a hospital bed with a wounded knee.

"This is the first time I have ever shown photos of my patients in a 20-year career, Hsiao Tzu-yu, doctor of the department of otolaryngology at the National Taiwan University Hospital said.

Hsiao said that he felt displaying the photos was a serious violation of doctor patient confidentiality and medical ethics.

Huang stressed that some people had spread rumors about the shooting to slander the head of the state, saying that the president was actually not injured and had even demanded to examine the president's stomach.

"We have contacted with the Chi Mei Hospital to try to find out whether there was a nurse who accused the government for manipulating the incident. The chief of the hospital told us that in fact there was a nurse who had made a call to Sisy Chen," Huang said.

"Looking at the photos, if the bullet was fired from a different angle and had hit the president one inch deeper, the president could have died," Huang said, adding that it was preposterous to think that the president's life could have been willfully endangered in such a manner.

The pan-blue camp has requested that all records of Chen and Lu's visit to Chi Mei be put aside for investigation.

Meanwhile, Tainan Chief Prosecutor Wang Jung-san yesterday said that there had been no further progress in the investigation of the assassination attempt due to the difficulties of obtaining ballistics evidence from the homemade bullets which were used for the shooting.

"Due to the poor quality of the bullets, we cannot make sure whether they were fired from the same pistol," said Wang. "Also, for the same reason, we still have difficulties to figure out the exact location where the gunman opened fire, whether he shot the president and vice president in the crowd or from a higher position in one of the buildings along the road."

Wang made his remarks during a press conference yesterday afternoon. He said that the two homemade bullets the police discovered now became the biggest obstacles for them to identify and locate the suspect since it is difficult to get useful evidence from the bullets.

"We cannot even figure out what kind of pistol it was," he said.

However, Wang said that investigators are now pretty sure that the shooting took place between No. 8 and No. 36 on Jinhua Rd. Sec. 3. He explained it with two pictures in his hand.

"The first picture was taken when the president's vehicle was traveling by No. 8. There was no bullet hole on the vehicle's windshield," said Wang.

"However, the hole appears on this one, when the vehicle was passing by No. 36," he said.

President Chen Shui-bian speaks on a mobile phone as he receives medical treatment on his gunshot wound in this photo released by the Presidential Office yesterday to refute allegations that the shooting was a campaign stunt.

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On March 22, 2004 ……

Lien demands an immediate recount

PROTEST: Addressing pan-blue demonstrators at the Presidential Office, the defeated KMT leader said he wants a recount, but the Cabinet said to let the legal system rule on the matter

By Huang Tai-lin, STAFF REPORTER

Stressing that he wants the result of Saturday's election to be annulled, defeated presidential contender Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan yesterday asked the High Court to immediately start inspecting the ballot boxes in a transparent and open process.

He also suggested that a special medical and criminal task force be created to investigate the shooting of President Chen Shui-bian on the eve of Saturday's vote.

"Chen should come forward soon and address our concerns, so that the people here can go home with peace of mind," Lien told thousands of pan-blue supporters yesterday afternoon in front of the Presidential Office.

The Cabinet, however, turned down those two requests last night, saying that since both the ballot inspection application and the shooting incident are being dealt with through the legal system, the Executive Yuan should not try to interfere with the independent operation of the legal system.

"The Premier has ordered the National Police Administration to enhance the efforts in protecting those ballots as well as to publicize evidence from the gunshot incident," said Lin Chia-lung, a Cabinet spokesman.

"The Cabinet has done what it should do and the requests of Mr. Lien have been heard by the relevant government departments," he said. "The cabinet, therefore, should not hand out any political promises, which may violate the country's legal base and hurt Taiwan's democracy."

The crowd at the Presidential Office had been steadily growing since 4am yesterday.

The High Court yesterday announced that it would seal the ballot boxes to preserve evidence, but did not immediately order a recount as the pan-blues had demanded.

Lien expressed his gratitude that the boxes had been sealed, but said, "I hope the relevant government agencies would start examining the ballots immediately, in a transparent and open process. The sooner the better, as everyone here needs to go back to work on Monday."

Many in the crowd were pan-blue supporters who had originally gathered outside the alliance's national campaign headquarters on Saturday night, where Lien took to the stage just after 8pm and announced that he would take legal action to have the election result declared invalid.

Lien lost the election to Chen by a razor-thin margin of less than 30,000 votes.

Citing the large number of invalid ballots and his many unanswered questions relating to Friday's assassination attempt on Chen, Lien and his running mate, People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong, called the election unfair and demanded a recount.

Just after midnight yesterday Lien and Soong reappeared outside the pan-blue campaign headquarters and staged a sit-in protest to demand a recount.

They were joined by Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng, who is also the director-general of the alliance's national campaign team, and together with several pan-blue legislators they led supporters in a demonstration to the Presidential Office at 4:10am.

At about 6:40am, Lien and Soong led the crowd in singing the national anthem before departing the scene. They reappeared later yesterday afternoon.

The growing crowd in front of the Presidential Office waved the national flags and the alliance's campaign flags and sounded blasts on air horns throughout the night.

Meanwhile, violent protests erupted in Taichung and Kaohsiung, where pan-blue supporters, led by pan-blue legislators, tried to force their way through police cordons and into local court offices to demand an immediate recount.

Pan-blue legislators took turns addressing the crowds from the back of trucks, which seemed to inflame the protesters' emotions.

A pan-blue campaign truck rams into the gate of the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors' Office while demonstrators try to push the gate over early yesterday morning.

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On March 22, 2004 ……

The referendum decided the election

It was disappointing that the result of the referendum on March 21 had been declared null and void due to the fact that less than 50 percent of all eligible voters in Taiwan voted in the referendum. Nevertheless, the referendum's significance and the role its played in the outcome of this past presidential election, in which incumbent President Chen Shui-bian was re-elected, must be recognized.

One thing that must be made clear is that it takes much more to pass a referendum in Taiwan than getting elected into the presidency. The former requires that, of all the eligible voters in Taiwan (16.5 million), at least 50 percent (8.26 million) must vote in the referendum for it to have any legal force; and then for the referendum topic(s) to be approved, at least 50 percent of that 8.26 million have to vote yes. Since it is impossible to have a 100 percent voter turn-out -- for example, there was an around 80 percent turn-out in this past election -- it meant that much more than 50 percent of the voters who voted in the presidential election on Saturday had to also vote in the referendum for it to have any legal standing.

According to Central Election Committee (CEC) statistics, around 7.45 million people took the ballots for the first referendum topics and 7.44 million for the second topic. Both figures far exceeded the number of votes Chen garnered in the election, which was 6.47 million (ie, 50.11 percent of the votes in the presidential election). These statistics mirror at least two significant facts. First, how silly was the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-People First Party (PFP) alliance's argument that, assuming all people who voted for Chen voted in the referendum, the fact that Chen was re-elected but the referendum was defeated gave reasonable grounds to suspect that the Chen administration had illegally tampered with the votes in order to get him re-elected. Actually, more than one million people who did not vote for Chen participated in the referendum. Moreover, more than 91 percent of those who took part in the referendum voted yes (around 6.78 million or so) on both referendum topics, which significantly exceeded the number of people who voted for Chen. Since only two teams of candidates ran in the election, it is safe to assume that quite some people who voted for the KMT-PFP alliance presidential candidate Lien Chan and vice presidential candidate James Soong voted yes to these referendum topics. This shows that the topics had won the endorsement of even less radical or more moderate pan-blue supporters.

It has to be mentioned that the DPP's votes in the past have consistently been around 35 percent and never went higher than 40 percent, and yet in Saturday's election Chen managed to garner more than 50 percent of the votes. This means that around 10 percent of votes cast for Chen came from non-traditional pan-green or moderate voters. Since the referendum on Saturday had been the core of Chen's campaign platform, the referendum had helped Chen win over that key 10 percent of the votes.

The significance of these statistics is further highlighted by the strong opposition to and boycott by the KMT and the PFP of the referendum, as well as pressure from China. In particular, while China has managed to keep a relatively low profile in its efforts to meddle with Taiwan's election, it is common knowledge how much Beijing loathes Chen.

All would agree that the referendum topics should be interpreted as a symbolic gesture in declaring sovereignty, and that Chen has positioned himself -- in contrast to his election opponents -- as a defender of that position. Under the circumstances, the re-election of Chen, coupled with the election statistics, hold critical significance above and beyond the conclusion reached by the Taiwan Affairs Office in its declaration yesterday -- that efforts to provoke cross-strait instability and divide the country through the referendum have failed.

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