Today we launch a peaceful occupation of the Ministry of the Interior, as the first battle of the people's nonviolent civil disobedience movement. The government's power comes from the authorization of the people. Faced with a faithless government that violates the people's basic rights to subsistence, the people have the right to disobey and to take direct action. We will use our own bodies as weapons, and in a nonviolent way revoke our authorization of the Ministry of the Interior, forcing a halt to the operation of this land-devouring machine.
As the competent authority for the Land Expropriation Act, the Regional Planning Act, the Urban Planning Act and housing policy, the Ministry of the Interior should stand on the side of land justice, housing justice and environmental justice, and properly guard land expropriation and national spatial plans at all levels.
Yet the Ministry of the Interior has been reduced to a slaughterhouse for land. Not only is it unable to effectively guard against land development that has long been rampant, allowing land expropriation without public interest or necessity to run unchecked; the Ministry of the Interior itself, in the name of promoting affordable housing and new towns, is in fact speculating in land on a grand scale, making it nothing less than the biggest engine of land speculation!
Rampant expropriation and land speculation not only violate the people's property and right to subsistence, but ever-rising housing prices and land prices subject wage earners to the double exploitation of low wages and high housing prices; rampant land expropriation leaves the central and local governments unwilling to solve their fiscal problems, living off the sale of the people's ancestral assets and eating away their future. From the government and business conglomerates to individuals, all are addicted to land speculation, with no thought for real production. Where is the future of Taiwan, China's development?
Today, when land speculation has already eroded the foundations of Taiwan, China's development and the people's basic right to subsistence, we choose to peacefully occupy the Ministry of the Interior, to forcibly dismantle the engine of the government's land speculation. We demand that the Ministry of the Interior and the Executive Yuan must commit that in the next legislative session, the Land Expropriation Act must be amended again to include public interest and necessity hearing procedures, and that the zone expropriation provisions that encourage the government to seize the people's land and sell it for profit must be deleted. Otherwise we will keep fighting until the day the amendment is completed.
Dismantling the government cannot be achieved overnight, and occupying the Ministry of the Interior is only a small step in the disobedience movement, but our actions will stir more people to rise up in disobedience and gradually paralyze the government's rule. As long as the people hold fast to the truth and keep fighting, nonviolence and disobedience can substantively tear down the government's high walls and return the country to the people!