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OPPOSITION GOING AGAINST THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE ON ARMS BILL: HSIEH

ROC Central News Agency

2005-12-23 21:49:12

    Taipei, Dec. 23 (CNA) The opposition's vote Friday to end a meeting to discuss the controversial arms bill before it had really even begun goes against the wishes of the electorate and is damaging the efficacy of the legislative body, Premier Frank Hsieh said Friday.

    The "green camp" of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party and the Taiwan Solidarity Union pushed the U.S. arms procurement bill through the Procedures Committee Tuesday by virtue of the fact that many opposition lawmakers were attending a different meeting, thus relinquishing their majority.

    Since the regulations say that the bill under consideration should be reviewed on the specific day requested, in this case Friday only, the opposition "pan-blue alliance" rallied its forces to the plenary session to make sure that no actual discussions took place.

    Lawmakers from the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) and the People First Party (PFP) proposed that the meeting be dismissed shortly after it started. A vote was taken and the "pan-blue alliance" easily had the meeting ended by a vote of 113 to 100.

    Premier Hsieh pointed out that the "pan-blue alliance" had the numbers to first discuss the bill and then vote it down Friday if they had wanted, regardless of what was said during the session, but instead they simply pulled the plug on the whole meeting. "The legislators in the majority could have easily just voted down the bill, but they chose to cut off discussions of it altogether. This must have been because they know that the public supports the bill and it seems like the opposition was being pressured by an invisible hand," Hsieh said.

    Hsieh was referring to a Ministry of National Defense poll released the previous day that indicated that about 70 percent of respondents were in favor of having the bill discussed in the legislature.

    The survey also showed that almost 53 percent of the people support the country acquiring the three defense items at issue. The current version of the bill includes eight conventional diesel-electric submarines, 12 P-3C submarine-hunting aircraft and six PAC-3 Patriot anti-missile systems from the United States.

    The request for the weapons began in the mid-1990s, when the KMT had ruling power. The U.S. government agreed to the arms package in April 2001.

    Cho Jung-tai, a spokesman for the Executive Yuan, said that the leaders of the "pan-blue alliance," KMT Chairman Ma Ying-jeou and PFP Chairman James Soong, are misrepresenting the will of the people by their party's actions. "The two leaders of the opposition met twice to talk on a number of issues, including the arms bill. The result of all this seems to run counter to the will of the people. The executive branch regrets that this is the way that they want to deal with the issue, " Cho said.

    Defending the day's events, Legislative speaker Wang Jin-pyng said that the meeting was ended entirely within the bounds of normal procedure, adding that other sessions in the past had been abruptly ended as well.

    Since ending the session effectively sends the bill back to the Procedures Committee, which then must again vote whether to put the bill back on the legislature's agenda for discussion, the arms package is no closer to becoming law than it was over a year ago.

    The opposition-dominated Procedures Committee will meet again in four days on Dec. 27.

(By Taijing Wu and Mark Wolfe)

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