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Updated Saturday, April 16, 2011 10:36 pm TWN, The China Post news staff

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Open letter is political ploy on behalf of Su Tseng-chang

Nat Bellocchi, a former chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), and an impressive number of academics and writers from the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia published an open letter to President Ma Ying-jeou in the Taipei Times and the Liberty Times on Monday. They want Ma to restrain himself from “using the judicial system for political purposes” so as to discredit the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its candidates for next year's presidential election.

Let's make things clear first. Bellocchi is a consultant to the vernacular Liberty Times and keeps an off-and-on column in the English-language Taipei Times. Both papers are owned by Lin Rung San, a former vice president of the Control Yuan who is an strong advocate of Taiwanese independence. They are considered the unofficial mouthpiece of the opposition party. The open letter, printed by no other leading newspapers in town, expressed the concerns of these academics and writers, including Bellochi who must regard himself as one of the latter, about an ongoing investigation by the Control Yuan of 17 luminaries accused of failing to return some 36,000 documents to the national archives.

One thing that is amazing to us is that Bellocchi, who had been American ambassador to Botswana and a deputy assistant secretary of state before his appointment by U.S. President Bill Clinton as AIT chairman, does not understand that a Control Yuan investigation does not necessarily lead to criminal prosecution. If our ombudsmen should find that the former DDP government officials, including ex-Premier Su Tseng-chang who may be the party's standard bearer against Ma in March 2012, violated the National Archives Act, they might be referred to public prosecutors for criminal investigation, which of course might lead to indictments and trials thereafter.

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