Taiwan News
Date: 2018/02/01
By: Taiwan News, Staff Writer
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Transitional justice is one of the major themes of President
National Women’s League HQ in Taipei. (By Central News Agency)
Tsai Ing-wen’s administration.
What that means in practice, has been on show recently in the shape of the investigation into the National Women’s League.
Despite a name which on the surface seems to indicate a perfectly natural preoccupation with women’s rights, the organization carries a lot of baggage with it.
The league was founded by President Chiang Kai-shek’s wife Soong Mei-ling in 1950, at the height of the Cold War and the White Terror, and has therefore always been seen as closely tied to the Kuomintang.
Its main official mission was to care for low-income military families, but one of the ways it claimed to do that was by using a Military Benefit Tax on the value of imported goods from 1955 to 1989. Questions have long surrounded the funding of its charity work, with demands for detailed accounts of how that income was spent.
The Ministry of Interior and the Ill-Gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee, the body set up by the government to address the financial dark side of the KMT era, reached an agreement with the National Women’s League late last year. The deal led to believe that a solution was possible by reducing confrontation to a minimum. [FULL STORY]
