1987 Lieyu massacre
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| 1987 Lieyu massacre | |
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| Part of boat people | |
Attack type | Massacre |
| Deaths | 19+ |
| Perpetrators | 158 Heavy Infantry Division, Kinmen Defense Command, Republic of China Army |
| Motive | 3: Order of taking no surrender, 16 (?): Eliminating witnesses[1][2] |
| 1987 Lieyu massacre | |
|---|---|
Hanyu Pinyin | Dōnggǎng cǎn'àn |
| History of the Republic of China | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 Republic of China (ROC). ROC military officially denied the massacre and defined it as an incident of "mistaken killings" (誤殺事件), hence named it the March 7 Incident (三七事件) or Donggang Incident (東崗事件).[3][4] There may have been more than nineteen deaths, including several families of ethnic Chinese Vietnamese.[5]
BackgroundThe entire Kinmen Archipelago, a group of about twenty islands and islets, were still considered a war zone at the time and were under martial law. The Kinmen Defense Command (金門防衛司令部, or KDC), a field army of the Republic of China (ROC) Army, controlled the islands in an effort to prevent an attack by the People's Liberation Army after the ROC had ended its attempt to retake mainland China by force in 1970.[6] On 18 December 1978, Deng Xiaoping announced the Chinese economic reform policy, followed by the establishment of 4 special economic zones. The international port of Xiamen was expanded for commercial traffic on 7 October 1980.[7][8] The KDC Commander, General Major-general Gong Li (龔力少將) to construct two propaganda walls—one 3.2m high and 20m long on Dadan Island, and the other on Erdan Island—with slogans proclaiming "Three Principles of the People Unify China" shining with neon lights at night until July 1995. Completed in August 1986, the walls faced the international seaway of Xiamen Bay,[12] where Xi Jinping (later CCP general secretary) was the Deputy Mayor of Xiamen City.[13]
 RefugeesFollowing the Indochinese refugees fled abroad. They often had to move several times as local authorities rejected those displaced by the crisis.[14] The Penghu Defense Command (澎湖防衛司令部 or PDC) cooperated with the "Hai-piao Project" (海漂專案) (an arrangement of the Overseas Community Affairs Council and the Chinese Association for Relief and Ensuing Services) to transport 2,098 refugees in 45 boats and the "Ren-de Project" (仁德專案) to relocate another 6,497 refugees by air. In total, over 12,500 people were rescued starting in 1975.[15][16][17]
On 1 April 1982, the Executive Yuan issued the "Pingjing Project" (平靖專案), a procedure instructing the Ministry of National Defense (MND) to return the refugees. The MND updated its standard operating procedure in 1985 but did not actually enforce the new guidance. Instead, the actual practice in the frontline was to kill detainees if a purge failed. They would either bury corpses perfunctorily on the beach or let the tides pull the bodies into the sea. The MND were well aware of the practice, but turned a blind eye. They forged ahead with purposeful "refugee warfare" which endangered national security.[18][19] IncidentsIn January 1985, a local Chinese sampan with eight fishermen suffered engine failure and floated ashore at Shi Islet, part of the 473 Brigade's defense region. When the platoon stationed there they contacted the KDC for instructions, where they were ordered to kill the stranded fishermen. Six died under crossfire but two escaped to a rock cave, kneeling down to beg for mercy. When discovered, those two were pushed off the rock cliff to fall to their death after the KDC reiterated the order to kill the entire crew. A subsequent search of the sampan found only a letter drafted by one of the sailors, a son telling his mother that he had collected sufficient yarn for her to knit a sweater for winter.[20] In April 1986, an incident occurred where a young couple, both teachers, swam from Xiamen to Dadan Island seeking asylum.[19] The commander of the Dadan Defense Team (大膽守備隊), Premier Deputy Division Commander of the 158 Lieyu Division (烈嶼師) Colonel Chien Yi-hu (錢奕虎上校), received the couple and escorted them to the KDC headquarter on the main island of Kinmen. Chien was immediately relieved of his post for violating the directive to "accept no surrender in the war zone".[21] In mid-July 1986, General Chao inspected the outlying islets of Lieyu, and noticed that the Nuclear weapons program
Both the KDC and the Matsu Defense Command (馬祖防衛司令部, or MDC) guarded nuclear artillery strike plans that targeting neighboring regions during the Cold War. These targeted regions included the strategic Xiamen City, even though the affected radius also covered the ROC's own stationed Dadan and Erdan Islands.[26] It is alleged that a previous nuclear weapons program undertaken since 1967 was forced to stop in 1977 under the pressure of United States and IAEA, but was followed by another hidden agenda. In 1986, after nearly 20 years of research and simulation testing, a successful minimized nuclear test at the Jioupeng military field in Pingtung was recorded by US satellite imagery; later, in 1988, it was questioned by the director of American Institute in Taiwan, David Dean, according to the diary of Superior-general Hau Pei-tsun.[27][28][29][30] The development of the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research at the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, who defected to the United States in January 1988.[31][32] A ROC military agent traced Chang's kid after school to locate their home in Washington, D.C. until finally violated the federal witness protection program, further leading to the confrontation of Director Dean with General Hau.[33][3][clarification needed ]
Massacre 
On 6 March 1987, a boat of Lieyu Island.
As a seasonal heavy fog appeared on the coast and gradually turned clear in the afternoon, the Vietnamese boat was sighted by an infantry post off the south shore of Lieyu at 16:37, where it had been too close and too late to apply for the indirect fire support by artillery intervention. The local 1st Dashanding Infantry Battalion (大山頂營) Commander, Major Liu Yu; the 472 Brigade Commander, Colonel Zhong; and the 158 Division G3 Chief Operation Officer (參三科科長), Colonel Han Jing-yue (韓敬越), arrived at the scene with staff officers.[34] The 629 Light Artillery Battalion—which happened to be taking a field drill practice in the ancient airport on the northeastern beachfront—launched a single star shell which lit up the background horizon sky, but found no invasion force approaching. Meanwhile, warning shots followed by expelling shots were fired in sequence as per the procedure steps in the rules of engagement, using T57 rifles, .30 caliber, and .50 caliber machine guns in short range by the 3rd Company and the reserve platoons of three companies while another one was coming in, totaling over 200 infantrymen. The Vietnamese boat was stranded on the sand beach southwest of Donggang (Dōnggāng) Fishery Port (Fort L-05), a sensitive strategic point in front of the mobile positions of Armor-piercing shells penetrated through the sky-blue wooden hull without detonation. Three unarmed Vietnamese left the boat, raised their hands, and pled in Chinese, "Don't shoot ...!" but were all shot dead.[38]
The local 3rd Dongang Company (東崗連) Commander, Lieutenant Chang, received the order from the brigade commander to dispatch a search team to board the boat. Two The following identification evidence was collected at the scene, and enlisted through the P4 (Internal Security) channel of the Political Warfare Department, the KDC, and the MND Army Commands HQ:
For unknown reasons, none of this evidence was later adopted by either the prosecutor or the judge, hence all the court documents named the victims only as the "unknown people" (不明人士).[19][41] After collecting the refugee documents, a mother and three children (one baby being held in her arm and two kids running around her) were killed together kneeling down on the beach.[5][18] The last words of the pregnant woman were in English: "Help me ... Help my baby ... My baby seven months ...", before she and two other women were killed by .45 caliber handgun shots; the battalion operation officer then made a joke on her dead body (never showing remorse during the annual reunions in subsequent years).[42] A boy got up to flee but was shot on the shoulder and fell down, until another officer stepped forward to finish him.[43] Major-general Gong arrived at Donggang at 18:30; Zhong and Liu reunited with Gong again at the Division Headquarters to report to General Chao by the phone landline at 21:00, and received Chao's praise.[19] At 07:00 the morning of 8 March 1987, the medical Battalion Headquarters (BHQ) Company was called in to bury all the bodies at the beach. The platoon members were ordered to kill any surviving refugees. The wounded were buried alive, and those who were still moving or crying were dictated to be killed by military shovels.[43][44] The entire boat was instructed to be burned (aside from the 3-blade propeller), then buried in sand to destroy all the evidence. The last victim, a young boy hidden underneath a board cell, was also found and killed by order without exception.[43] The guarding sergeant of the BHQ Company overnight counted the bodies as more than nineteen.[45][5]
Over 30 individual rifles with good routine Brigade Headquarter Company (RHQ) commander to take over the BHQ Company as the emergency measure to prevent mutiny and to blockade the site.[46]
RevelationCover-upA local store owner heard the crying of the refugees overnight and made a phone call to inform wild dogs from the landfill (小金垃圾場) on the back side of the western hill. The bodies were later reburied collectively in one mound at a second site on the higher ground next to the tree line. This task was performed by the 1st Company, who had just resumed their posts after winning the annual Army Physical and Combat Competitions in Taiwan.[48] Accounts of ghost sightings prompted villagers to hold religious ceremonies, and a tiny shrine was built by soldiers on the beach the next year. This activity made it all the more difficult to prevent the spread of information about the incident.[49][37] Nonetheless, both sites, along with 04 Station, L-05 Fort, Donggang Port, and even the breakwater bank, were all demolished with bulldozers in name of demining in August 2011.[50] In 2021, the local villagers rebuilt a new shrine beside the path inland in lament.[51]
In early May 1987, company commanders against government regulation and ethics on the eve of Dragon Boat Festival.[54] However, at the end of May, recently discharged conscript soldiers from Kinmen began to arrive in Taiwan proper and finally were able to appeal to the newly founded opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party. The information of the massacre started to spread in Taiwan.[24]
Ten weeks after the massacre, the Superior-general Hau Pei-tsun on 20 May, General Chao still lied: "It was just a couple of 'Communist soldiers' [referring to the People's Liberation Army] being shot in the water", but Chao's statement was obviously unbelievable. Hau then ordered that the corpses to be moved from the beach to a remote hidden slope in front of Fort L-03 (east cape) on the right, filled over with cement, and a concrete military training wall be built on top to prevent any future investigation.[43] General Chao ordered all the 158 Division officers to be present as participating the cover-up operation.[43] To this day, the corpses remain sealed and unmarked at this final third site.[55][43]
At the end of their conscription service terms, the soldier witnesses were ordered to sign an oath to maintain silence and guard the secret for life before returning home to Taiwan.[56][49] On 5 June 1987, CensorshipThe case was classified as military secret for 20 years to prevent any further information leaks. For the same reason, the Hujingtou Battle Museum of Lieyu (built since 1989) conspicuously left out any information of this part of history,[60] nor was it documented in the official archive of the Kinmen National Park that took over the beach management later. The official cover-up story of the Chinese fishing boat sunk by one shell of bombardment was told to the public for 13 years, until being uncovered by the publication of 8-year Diary of the Chief of the General Staff (1981-1989) (八年參謀總長日記) by Superior-general Hau in 2000.[3] The Government of the Republic of China has made no comment thereafter. AftermathPolitical stage With the support of ROC politics. The opposition party, supported by the international community, took the chance to force Chiang Ching-kuo to lift the martial law and begin the democratization process to distance itself from the Kuomintang's One China Policy. This developed with the promotion of neoliberal tendency in Taiwan in a way that blocked the political forces that favored a return to reunification.[62]
Later, on 14 July, Minister Cheng endorsed President Chiang's historical decree to end the notorious 38-year-long period of InvestigationAfter the scandal was exposed, President Chiang Ching-kuo received a letter from Amnesty International expressing humanitarian concern, and assigned the Chief of General Staff, Superior-general Hau, to investigate this case.[3] On 16 June 1977, President of the Control Yuan (CY), Huang Tsun-chiu of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), assigned the committee member Ruo Wen-fu (羅文富) on an official investigation task to Lieyu. General Hau opposed this CY jurisdiction and considered the tour a pro-governmental "sightseeing visit" (參訪金門).[3] However, after Ruo submitted a field survey report expectedly identical to the KDC's story, Huang did not approve nor rejected the content, but only signed a word "Read" (閱) on 9 March 1988, which rendered the investigation incomplete.[67][5] The Minister of National Defense, Cheng Wei-yuan, also arrived in Kinmen, and dispatched a special envoy of the Political Warfare Bureau to conduct the field investigation and excavation that discovered the civilian cadavers and eventually solved the criminal case on 23 May. On 28 May, the Military Police began to detain over 30 officers back to Taiwan for court-martial, including the commanders, corresponding political officers, and related staff officers along the 5 levels on the chain of command; 45 officers received the administrative sanction of dishonored transfer.[68] Nonetheless, the court-martial did not follow the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention and the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to process this case. The accused has never been charged for the wrongdoings to the international refugees, regardless of evidence, but each was prosecuted for killing several "unknown people" of the "bandit area"[note 1] (applying only to the domestic criminal codes) on 11 September 1987. Division Commander Gong, Political Warfare Director Colonel Chang, and the P4 Section Leader Lieutenant-colonel Hong were released free in 10 days.[19][18] TrialsThe first trial on 30 May 1988 sentenced Commander Zhong to 2 years and 10 months in prison, Liu to 2 years and 8 months, and Li and Chang to 2 years and 6 months, but the prosecutor and all four defendants appealed for rehearing. The MND then repealed the sentences on 9 September as failing to check the facts and reasons favoring the defendants. The retrial on 19 December 1988 reduced the sentences for Zhong to 1 year and 10 months, Liu to 1 year and 10 months, and Li and Chang to 1 year and 8 months, and all commuted with a probation period of 3 years; therefore, none of the convicted field commanders were required to spend one day in prison.[19] They stayed in rank with posts suspended to continue service without pay until the end of the term, before relocating to the training officer positions. Their retirement and pension plans were not affected. Commander Zhong took a senior lead colonel position in a military academy, Army Communication, Electronics and Information School.[19] Likewise, the superior officers received no official punishment, and recovered their military careers after President Chiang suddenly died in January 1988.[69] Principal staff officer Major-general Fan Jai-yu (范宰予少將) was promoted to the commander of the 210 Heavy Infantry Division of Hualien Expansion in 1989; then further to lieutenant-general, commander of the Penghu Defense Command in 1994; and then to the Principal of the Political Warfare Cadres Academy in 1996. Division Commander Major-general Gong Li was shifted to the Chief of Staff of the War College, National Defense University; then promoted to the deputy commander of the Huadong Defense Command in 1992; and then became the Civil Level-12 Director of Banqiao District House of the Veterans Affairs Council in 2000. Kinmen Defense Commander Chao was promoted to deputy chief commander Vice-president Wu Den-yih presented a commendation decree by President Ma Ying-jeou, who praised Chao's 50-year career in national security with so-called "loyalty, diligence, bravery, perseverance, intelligence, wisdom, insight and proficiency" (忠勤勇毅，才識閎通), and that "his virtue and conducts have set a good example model for future generations to follow..." (武德景行，貽範永式... 逾五十載攄忠護民，越半世紀衛國干城，崇勛盛業，青史聿昭).[71] Chao was buried in the National Wuzhi Mountain Military Cemetery.[72]
Later developmentsTwenty years later, in May 2007, Major Liu Yu, the 1st Battalion Commander, proclaimed in a military magazine interview that they were executing direct superior orders, and one officer who killed the refugees was never charged.[73] Ten years later, in January 2018, Liu was invited by the Kinmen National Park administration to re-visit the old posts of the South Lieyu Defense Team. On the beach, he recalled to a China Times journalist that he "handled" over 100 corpses—including in the Donggang Incident—during his total four years of assignments within three KDC terms.[74] On 19 July 2020, Instructor Colonel (Ret.) Liao Nianhan (廖念漢) of the Mỹ Lai massacre.[75] However, in January 2022, Captain Li changed his statement in a cross-examination through Facebook with the other veterans of 158 Division before the Lunar New Year. He then confirmed the boat stranding site and the later killings at two different locations.[76]
The chilling effect of the massacre made the international refugees extinct from the Kinmen sea area, and the last Jiangmei refugee camp, which had operated for 11 years in Penghu, was shut down on 15 November 1988 due to the policy change.[19][16] The purge policy on the Chinese fishermen and the surrendered remained the same, as the technique instructed by the new 158 Division Commander, Major-general Song En-ling, to the G3 staff officers: "Tell the landed people to run or will be shot; then wait after they run to kill them".[19] However, in live practice, the survivors were taken into custody with their head covered for transferring to a temporary lodgment to be expelled later, and the political officers started to repay for the civilian casualties. After negotiation for compensation failed, local Chinese fishing boats sometimes gathered around the incident islands to protest. Particularly in July and August 1990, the ROC military was criticized by the general Taiwanese public for the cheating and ignorance attitude on the Min Ping Yu No. 5540 and No. 5502 disasters. Therefore, the Red Cross Society of China and Red Cross Society of the Republic of China—representing both sides—signed the Kinmen Agreement on 12 September to establish the humanitarian repatriation procedures through Kinmen.[77][78] On 7 November 1992, the provisional martial law control was historically lifted after 42 years of the War Zone Administration in power, and KDC returned governmental and civilian services management to the local county offices.[64] Still, it was not until 1955 that the first marine police patrols appeared in the Kinmen and Matsu regions. The Water Police Bureau, formally established on 15 June 1998, fully took over the marine law enforcement, working with local police stations and the coastal justice systems; it was later reformed as the Coast Guard Administration under the Ocean Affairs Council.[79][80] Over 100 years after its establishment in 1911, the Republic of China still lacks refugee law to regulate the political asylum process in accordance with modern international laws,[81][82][83][84] and its government has never rendered an apology or any legal compensation to the families or country of the victims.[85][86][87] On 3 October 2018, legislator Freddy Lim, former Chairman of the Amnesty International Taiwan, inquired in a hearing of the Foreign and National Defense Committee to examine the victims' files in the military archives in order to express an apology to their families through the Vietnamese Representative Office (Vietnamese: Văn phòng Kinh tế Văn hoá Việt Nam), but Minister of National Defense General Yen Teh-fa disagreed: "The troops were following the SOP rules of the martial law period to execute [the orders], though it might look like having some issues nowadays; also, they have been court-martialed...".[85][86] Later, MND replied: "It has been too difficult to identify the deceased due to the long time, so [the case] cannot be processed further", which served as the sole statement of the ROC government for over 30 years after the martial law lifted in 1987.[4] On 2 October 2021, a third round of Anonymous hacks on a Chinese government tourism promotion website included a meme stating "If Taiwan wants to truly become Numbah Wan [sic], it must first redress the 1987 Lieyu Massacre", with a public Wikimedia Commons image of Xiamen, Lieyu, and Kinmen in the background.[88] On 13 July 2022, Control Yuan member Gao Yong-cheng submitted a re-investigation report after one year of documentation based on the provided military archive and interviews with near 20 veteran witnesses. Interviewees included the convicted officers, whose testimonies (without passing lie detection) contradicted each other with retracted confessions, and contradicted new evidence and controversies at the first site, since the last CY investigation reported 34 years ago was considered incomplete.[19] The investigation then received the approval from the joint committees of the Judicial and Prison Administration Affairs, the Domestic and Ethnic Affairs, the Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs, and the National Defense and Intelligence Affairs.[41][19] The report condemned the KDC for falsifying the facts, the court-martial prosecutor and judge for failing their duties of investigation, and the MND for ignorance throughout 35 years. It then recommended the Ministry of Justice re-open this case with a special appeal for the legal re-investigation.[5][41][18] Legacy
See also
Notes
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Further reading
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