Taiwan protesters demand election recount

TAIPEI, Taiwan - Thousands of opponents staged a raucous sit-in Sunday to protest President Chen Shui-bian's ever-so-thin re-election victory, and a high court sealed ballot boxes to await a possible recount.

Chen's political rival, Lien Chan, urged supporters at a rally in Taipei to forge ahead with protests until judges agree to recount 13,000 sealed ballot boxes. A decision on the matter may come Monday.

Meanwhile, as violent protests erupted in southern Taiwan, in the capital of Taipei some 10,000 people jammed a boulevard in front of the presidential palace, blasting ear-splitting air horns.

Chen's apparent victory sent ripples across East Asia, causing indigestion in Beijing, where he is reviled for steering Taiwan on a course toward independence, and unsettling residents of Hong Kong, where activists fear intensified hostility from a China intent on avoiding a "people power" clamor for democracy.

Chen squeaked out a narrow re-election triumph Saturday, winning by a margin of about 0.2 percent, or fewer than 30,000 votes of the nearly 13 million votes cast.

Chen, who suffered a grazing gunshot wound to the stomach by a would-be assassin while campaigning Friday, did not appear in public Sunday. But his office released a series of photographs showing doctors treating him in an attempt to persuade the public that the attack wasn't phony. In one photo, he looks dazed as doctors attend to an inch-deep wound in his abdomen.

Presidential spokesman James Huang said Chen's photos and medical records were being released so that "all the controversies and rumors will come to an end."

At the protest rally in Taipei, placards read, "Shame" and "We Want a Recount."

"I feel I've been cheated. I feel angry, very, very angry," said Yan Suying, a middle-aged woman. "I don't believe in the shooting. It's so bizarre."

In the southern cities of Taichung and Kaohsiung, protesters tried to break through barricades of riot police to reach courthouses.

At the heart of the dispute are some 337,297 spoiled ballots, more than 11 times the margin of Chen's victory.

"People are telling us from everywhere that there are a lot of problems (with the vote count)," said Sun Kauo-hwa, a legislator from the opposition Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party. "That's why we asked the courts: `Hold it. Hold on to everything. Let's do the recount. Let's look at all the invalid ballots. Are they truly invalid?'"

In a statement late Sunday, the Lien campaign said 200,000 police and soldiers were confined to their barracks and "deprived of the right to vote" because of a security alert imposed after the attack on Chen. The alert kept them from going to precincts.

The campaign demanded a "transparent, full-scale" recount of the ballots, and also called for an impartial team of foreign and domestic ballistics and medical experts to look into the "suspicious gunshot case" involving the president.

International experts cast doubt on charges of voting irregularities, saying the number of spoiled ballots tripled from elections in 2000 because some voters wanted to protest the election.

"People are unfamiliar with the fact that there were all these people deliberately casting invalid ballots," said Yang Dali, a China expert from the University of Chicago who came to observe the election.

Another observer was even more emphatic.

"There can simply be no doubt that the count is accurate," said James Seymour, a research scholar at Columbia University who is visiting Taipei. "We in the United States know what an illegitimate election is, and yesterday's election was not it."

Chen's razor-thin victory, and the intensity of his opposition, underscores both the growing desire within Taiwan to ensure that the island doesn't fall under China's political umbrella as well as the deep divisions on the island, which has only 23 million citizens but is a global export powerhouse.

While choosing his public statements carefully, Chen has left no doubt that he believes Taiwan is already a sovereign state, independent of China, which regards it as a province of the mainland. He promises his followers that a new constitution will be drawn up for public approval by 2006, an action that China says may trigger war.

In the run-up to the election, state-run media in China heaped scorn on Chen as "immoral" and "an irresponsible and dangerous person."

Chen's re-election, if it stands, is a bitter pill for Beijing, which had openly hoped for a victory by Lien, who seeks less confrontation with China.

Political analysts said they expect both Chen and Communist leaders in Beijing to climb down a bit as they face concerns of dealing with one another over the next four years on practical matters such as cross-Strait travel and illegal immigration.

"The present administration needs to show to Beijing that, `Here, I'm in control. This is a democracy. I'm the person you can deal with,'" said Lin Bih-jaw, a political scientist at Taipei's National Chengchi University. "There's an urgent need to stabilize the relationship."

China declines to meet with the Chen administration until it agrees to Beijing's understanding of the "one-China principle," which says there is but one China and Taiwan is a part of it. Every year, more and more Taiwanese appear to find such an understanding untenable.

China has some 500 ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan. Military experts say China will have built up sufficient amphibious capabilities by 2006 or so to give it an option for a massive sea-borne invasion.