Mon, Jan 20, 2003 page8

• Editorial: A long-overdue awakening

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  The news that the government is to create a Taiwan-Tibet cultural exchange foundation, in a bid to replace the existing Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission, marks a step more serious than many people might realize.

  Most of our readers will understand it as the ROC's catching up, in part at least, with the reality from which it has woefully averted its eyes for decades. The ROC government has long cherished the fantasy that Mongolia is a part of its sovereign territory despite the fact this vast country has been independent for 80 years or more. But then the ROC government has until recently thought of itself as the government of China and as such it has indirectly supported Beijing's brutal colonialist repression of the Tibetans by upholding China's claim -- and it doesn't matter here which China -- to be the lawful sovereign of that sad land.

  This is something that has worked to Taiwan's detriment in a number of ways. First, the old KMT government's nefarious politicking among the various Tibetan exile groups managed to win it the ill will of almost everyone concerned. Taiwan's interest in fomenting unrest among the Tibetans worked directly against the best interests of both the exiles -- who sooner or later have to reach an accommodation with Beijing, if Beijing is ever enlightened enough to let them do so -- and the Tibetans still living in Tibet, the justice of whose cause it compromises.

  Secondly, if there is one thing that Taiwan must be a steadfast champion of on the international stage, one policy with which it must become clearly identified, it is the right of a people to self-determination, be it Tibetans, Timorese, Kurds or Palestinians. It is absurd to claim to support the cause of the Tibetans while at the same time working to undermine those Tibetans who want self-determination rather than a more enlightened colonial status -- which had been the previous government's confused policy. And some readers might remember the slap in the face delivered to the Dalai Lama during the arrangements for his visits to Taiwan when it was suggested that it should be the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission that should issue him with an entry permit.

  Taiwan's policy on Tibet and Mongolia has ranged from the merely stupid to the genuinely reprehensible. What must now be made clear is that there is a huge difference between what is in the best interests of the de facto sovereign republic that Taiwan now is and the best interests of the "juridical person" of the ROC. What constitutes catching up with reality for Taiwan might seem like a form of defeat for the ROC with its bizarre Constitution containing Article 119 about the nature of the Mongolian banner system and Article 120: "The self government system of Tibet shall be protected."

  Sooner or later the obsolescence of the Constitution will become so manifest that Taiwanese might actually work up the courage to sit down and write a new one, as former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) has called for. We can only hope that that day is not too long delayed.

  For the moment, this small victory for pragmatism can only be a good thing. Taiwan's dissolution of the agencies that uphold the pretensions of the ROC has been painfully slow but it is welcome not simply because it is about time that Taiwan's official policy was more in accord with international realities, making the nation less of a laughing stock, but because, as the dead skin of the ROC is sloughed off, we hope there will emerge the core of a new Taiwanese consciousness. The proposed move is, therefore, not primarily for Mongolians or Tibetans, it is primarily for the people of Taiwan.
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