Comic relief: Taiwan's latest UN
bid By Craig Meer
TAIPEI - On Tuesday, the latest and
perhaps most theatrical of Taiwan's campaigns to
join the United Nations was rejected by a
committee of the UN General Assembly. It is the
14th year in a row that Taipei's quest to gain UN
membership has been defeated.
The
application for membership was presented by a
group of small nations from Latin America, Africa
and the Pacific that still formally recognize the
Republic of China (ROC), and met a hostile
response from the People's Republic of China
(PRC), which
argued, "Taiwan has been an
inseparable part of China since antiquity."
This year, Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign
Affairs (MoFA) and the Government Information
Office (GIO) treated journalists to an especially
entertaining display of their public relations
know-how, or lack thereof. The theme for the 2006
UN bid, unveiled at a press conference on August
28, was "UNhuman rights" - written backward.
Officials said this was intended to provoke the
question, "With Taiwan's exclusion, is the UN
moving in reverse?"
The head of the GIO,
Cheng Wen-tseng, suggested that the mind-bending
slogan was inspired by the puzzles of the
best-selling book The Da Vinci Code.
Taiwan's official website for this year's
UN campaign included other mentally challenging
paraphernalia such as an animated welcome page
titled "Free Kick" in which the goal shooter in a
soccer match, representing Taiwan, attempts to
score past opposition players representing the PRC
and Resolution 2758. The second of these "soccer
stars" represents the General Assembly vote that
saw Taiwan thrown out of the UN in October 1971
and replaced by the PRC.
While the average
foreign observer could be forgiven for thinking
the Taiwanese see marketing their cause as merely
one step removed from a Hello Kitty promotion, the
topic is deadly serious and passionately felt.
"UN entry is vital for the international
representation of Taiwan's 23 million people,"
Ambassador Lu Qing-long, a MoFA spokesman, said in
a telephone interview. "The international
community must understand that we are a nation and
that we are not simply a province of China.
Beijing does not represent us.
"We
contribute to the international community, and
despite poor recognition abroad, we already give a
substantial sum to the international aid pool -
around 0.14% of gross domestic product. We are
locked out of the global health system [the World
Health Organization], and this presents a serious
problem in the event of outbreaks of communicable
diseases. And finally, it's just not fair. Why
should we be excluded? There are so many reasons
why we should be allowed to enter the UN," Lu
said.
Polls show that the overwhelming
majority of Taiwanese agree with this proposition
despite their stand on other issues such as
independence. Polling conducted over the past
decade consistently reveals that more than 80% of
the public support Taiwan's annual UN bid.
If Taiwan's bid to join the UN had
actually succeeded, it would have done a lot to
boost the standing of embattled President Chen
Shui-bian. The latest round of a campaign to oust
Chen saw 90,000 people hit the streets of central
Taipei last Saturday.
The Republic of
China was a founding member of the UN, and the
reasons for its rejection in the early 1970s are
complex - attributable as much to the
inflexibility of former president Chiang Kai-shek
as to diplomatic maneuvering by the PRC and the
United States.
However, the contemporary
reason for the island's continued exclusion is
simple enough: the PRC has a diplomatic
stranglehold on Taiwan and, with a mixture of
carrots, sticks and the one-China principle, has
reduced the island's international recognition to
a fraction of that of a normal state. A grand
total of just 24 nations have formal diplomatic
ties with the ROC.
"The diplomatic
pressure on Taiwan has probably neither increased
nor decreased in the last few years, but it is
changing, becoming more complicated," said
Professor Philip Yang of National Taiwan
University.
"There are two aspects to
this. The first is a desire [on behalf of the PRC]
to isolate or prevent any move toward Taiwan
independence. Recent policy, and you can include
the Anti-Succession Law in this, has been
consistently designed to deny sovereignty.
"The second aspect is the emergence of
bureaucratic differences between the PRC's
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Taiwan Affairs
Office [TAO]. More recently, these two agencies
have been contradicting each other [such that
foreign affairs continues a strict policy of
isolating Taiwan, while TAO is more liberal],
making a response difficult," he said.
Both factors play directly to the
reunification-independence debate in domestic
Taiwanese politics, Yang suggested, and makes
moderation and compromise in cross-strait affairs
extremely difficult for local policymakers.
Lu, the MoFA spokesman, said the PRC has
been unwilling to entertain any of the standard
diplomatic solutions that the UN forged during the
Cold War. Both East and West Germany were separate
members of the UN before they reunited in 1990;
North and South Korea are members today. Nor has
it recognized some of the new models that have
been applied to non-state actors.
It is
ironic that while non-governmental organizations
such as the International Red Cross and Greenpeace
should enjoy increasing access to the UN system,
Taiwan's chances of being accepted in any capacity
are diminishing year by year. The PRC's objection
to the island being included merely as an observer
in the World Health Organization only makes sense
if you adopt an 18th-century version of
sovereignty, analysts say.
But Taiwan's
annual UN bid, with all its ham-fisted PR, is
unlikely to stop any time soon.
"The
annual campaign to join the UN is a reminder to
the world that there is a real problem here that
is not going to go away any time soon," said Yang.
"In the future, I think that regardless of who's
in power in Taiwan, and even if there is some kind
of cross-strait deal struck, the yearly routine
will continue. This year the government has chosen
human rights as the theme for the application. It
changes from year to year, but the basic motive
remains the same."
So it seems we're due
for more theater. Just how long it will continue
to be comedy rather than tragedy is probably up to
Beijing.
Craig Meer is a
freelance journalist who lives in Taipei.
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