🚀 go-pugleaf

                             SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
                     Copyright 1994, San Jose Mercury News

 DATE: Monday, August  1, 1994
 PAGE: 7A                         EDITION: Stock Final
 SECTION: Front                   LENGTH:  9 in. Medium
 SOURCE: Associated Press
 DATELINE: Taipei,*Taiwan*

                  PIRATE RADIO SUPPORTERS BATTLE*TAIWAN*POLICE

    About 500 people hurling rocks and acid-filled bottles clashed
with*riot*
police today to protest a police crackdown on illegal radio stations.
    Police said 22 policemen were injured in the clash outside the
Government
Information Office, which oversees the news media. The office organized
police raids on 14 unlicensed radio stations Saturday.
    Protest organizers said 20 protesters were injured, two critically, when
police beat them with batons.
    State television showed protesters hurling rocks across barbed-wire
barricades at policemen, who turned water cannons on the crowd.
    The protesters later marched to the National Police Administration
building, where they tossed firebombs and shattered windows of nearby
government buildings with clubs, witnesses said. Three cars were set on fire
and several other cars were smashed, police said.
    Police restored order after three hours.
    The protesters were answering a call to stage a demonstration by the
illegal ''Voice of People'' station, which resumed operation with spare
broadcasting equipment one day after police seized its main equipment.
    Chang Chin-che, the station's operator and the protest leader, told
reporters the demonstrators were fighting for freedom of speech. Supporters
have guarded the station and its staffers to prevent police arrests.
    Last year, the*Taiwan*government relaxed four decades of its monopoly of
the air waves to allow private radio stations.
    Underground stations surfaced because the government set stringent
capital and equipment requirements for issuing licenses for new radio
stations.
    Operators of the stations, mostly members of the opposition Democratic
Progressive Party, claimed the crackdown was aimed at weakening opposition
support prior to elections in December.
    The pirate stations encourage call-ins and urge listeners to attend
anti-
government demonstrations. Officials have complained the stations allow
callers to level unsubstantiated corruption charges anonymously.
END OF DOCUMENT.