The Shooting on the Nineteenth of March
At 1:45 in the afternoon on March 19, 2004, President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu were standing in an open jeep on the third section of Jinhua Road in Tainan. There were firecrackers and crowds along the street, and two shots went off inside that noise without anybody registering them at once. Lu's right knee was grazed. Chen had an eleven-centimeter wound across his abdomen. The motorcade went on some distance before turning toward Chi Mei Hospital.
The election was the next day. That afternoon the national security mechanism was activated, leave was canceled and police and military personnel were held at their posts, so that close to two hundred thousand of them did not vote. The count came in on the evening of March 20: Chen and Lu 6,471,970 votes, Lien Chan and James Soong 6,442,452 — a margin of 29,518, or 0.228 percent.
Lien announced that night that he would file suits to void the election and to void the result. Crowds gathered at the Central Election Commission and on Ketagalan Boulevard; the march on March 27 was claimed at half a million, and the sit-in continued until police cleared it before dawn on April 10. A nationwide recount finished on May 10, with small discrepancies and no change to the outcome. The litigation ran into 2005, and both suits were finally dismissed.
The forensic work went to the Criminal Investigation Bureau and to Henry Lee, invited from the United States. He arrived…
The forensic work went to the Criminal Investigation Bureau and to Henry Lee, invited from the United States. He arrived on March 26 and reported in August, concluding that the shooting was a real event, that two homemade rounds had been fired from a modified weapon, and that the shot had come from within the crowd at the roadside. On March 16, 2005, the task force named the suspect: Chen Yi-hsiung, a Tainan resident, who had drowned off Anping on March 29, 2004. His family came forward to account for what they knew. The case was closed with no defendant.
The legislature passed a special act creating a truth commission, and in December 2004 the Council of Grand Justices found several of its delegations unconstitutional in Interpretation 585. Prosecutors, police, courts, the legislature and the grand justices all handled the same event, each producing a conclusion within its own competence, and the sum of those conclusions changed very few minds.
Taiwan's later political estrangement is often traced back to those two bullets. What they actually left behind is not an unsolved case. It is a habit: from then on, before any election result is announced, there are people already prepared not to believe it.
Firecrackers were going off along the roadside as the motorcade passed. The crackers, the loudspeakers and the motorcycle engines lay on top of one another, and two gunshots inside that were almost impossible to pick out; a great many people only understood that something had happened minutes later, when the vehicles accelerated and turned. The first reaction of the shopkeepers nearby was to pull down their shutters, and then the whole street began making phone calls. Afterward that stretch of road was reconstructed over and over: the angle of the trajectory, the speed of the vehicle, the position of the crowd, which videotape caught what. The third section of Jinhua Road became a piece of street taken apart to the millimeter. People who live there tend to describe it flatly. It was very loud that afternoon, then there were a lot of police, and then our doorway was on television for a long time. Their memory of the whole affair is closer than anyone else's in the country, and smaller.
Isle of Time