The nation's top military leader yesterday threw his weight behind claims of a coup plot by pan-blue supporters after the bitterly disputed presidential election in 2004.Reminds me of a supposed coup early warning system that an ex-U.S. military man told me about, and was in operation as late as the mid 1990s -- a helmeted, armed soldier standing guard at the foot of each bridge leading into Taipei, 24 hours per day. The idea was that these soldiers would raise the alarm if they saw any unscheduled military convoys crossing into the city. They withdrew the guards in 1995 or 1996 after one of them was killed for his rifle by gangsters.
During a legislative hearing, Minister of National Defense Lee Jye (李傑) yesterday said that some military personnel had approached him and asked him to feign sickness and step aside so that they could organize a coup against President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁).
On Monday, a second hearing began at the Taiwan High Court in a suit filed by former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) against Chen Shui-bian. They claim that he defamed them by asserting that there had been an attempted coup d'etat following their defeat in the election.
At Monday's hearing, Chen's lawyer showed the judge classified documents that he claimed proved the coup attempt.
He claimed that the classified documents clearly record persons, happenings, times, locations and evidence of the coup attempt.
The Liberty Times, a Chinese-language newspaper and the sister paper of the Taipei Times, yesterday reported that the classified documents said an "incumbent military adviser to the Presidential Office" and a former chief of the general staff had talked to Lee Jye and asked him to step aside on March 24, 2004.
Lee Jye, who was Chief of General Staff at the time, yesterday confirmed these reports.
"Some unidentified military personnel came to me and asked me to `play sick' so they could carry out their plans to oust the president. But, when I refused immediately, they just walked away," Lee said. "These people said that they came to me on behalf of `certain group of people.'"
However, Lee said that neither former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan (連戰) nor People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) had approached him or sent anyone to see him on their behalf. But he said he was quite sure that the military personnel who came to him were pan-blue supporters.
"However, I couldn't say whether these military personnel came to me on behalf of Lien and Soong," Lee added.
Another memory from those days -- my Mandarin teacher at the Taipei Language Institute (中華語文研習所) telling me that if a DPP (民進黨) government declared independence for Taiwan, her son, who was then doing his military service, had pledged to her that he would shoot any commanding officer who supported it. Yes, she was a mainlander, and probably a New Party (新黨) supporter at the time -- she was very suspicious of the GMD (國民黨) under Lee Deng-hui (李登輝).
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