The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is looking into a petition by 34 foreign academics and former government officials that criticized President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration over government accusations that 17 former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) officials failed to return 36,000 official documents.
The open letter, dated April 8 and published in the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) on April 10 and the Taipei Times the following day, was co-signed by Nat Bellocchi, former chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan and 33 academics, writers and former government officials from the US, Canada, Europe and Australia.
Following the letter’s publication, some Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers, including Chiu Yi (邱毅), appeared on TV talk shows on Monday night and questioned whether the signatories were fully aware of the content of the letter.
Bruce Linghu (令狐榮達), head of the ministry’s Department of North American Affairs, said yesterday the ministry would contact each of the signatories to check if they initiated the petition themselves or just added their names to it, what their concerns were and what exactly they knew about the matter.
“We heard that Bellocchi seldom goes out nowadays and it is not so often that people have a chance to talk to him. It seems he has not been well recently. We are checking this out,” Linghu said.
Linghu said the ministry would make it clear to the signatories that the government’s decision to turn over the missing documents’ case to the Control Yuan for investigation was made based on the law and would ask them to respect Taiwan’s legal system.
At a separate setting, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Thomas Hou (侯平福) told the legislature’s Foreign and Defense Committee the ministry had demanded that the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the US look into the matter on Monday, with results expected in a week.
KMT Legislator John Chiang (蔣孝嚴) yesterday asked Hou to give him a copy of the original letter along with other open letters addressed to Ma by Bellocchi and others in recent years.
“This was the sixth letter. Has the ministry ever tried to get the original English copies? The letter [in the Liberty Times] was written in Chinese. I don’t believe that all the 34 academics [who signed it] understand Chinese and are able to write Chinese characters. Was the original version in Chinese or English?” Chiang said.
Chiang said he doubted the original letter was written in English, as the ministry has said.
“It’s a reasonable assumption that the letter was originally written in Chinese. [Bellocchi] had a written Chinese version in place and had others put their names on it. Their position has been clear, which is to attack the Ma Ying-jeou administration, accusing it of taking democracy a step backward, abusing political power and harboring political motives,” Chiang said.
Chiang said Bellocchi “deserved condemnation for interfering with the country’s internal affairs” because he had been an official with the US State Department attending to foreign affairs concerning Taiwan.
Chiang said Bellocchi has lost his credibility and objectivity in commenting on issues related to Taiwan because he has been close to the DPP and has had his articles published in the Liberty Times after his retirement, which clearly showed his political inclinations.
Multiple sources involved in the drafting of the letter have confirmed to the Taipei Times that the original was written in English and that all 34 signatories saw its content before it was translated into Chinese and distributed to the media. Several of the academics also played a role in its drafting.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY STAFF WRITER
Taiwan aims to open 18 representative offices and seven Taiwan Tourism Information Centers worldwide by next year to attract international visitors, the Tourism Administration said on Saturday. The agency has so far opened three representative offices abroad this year and would open two more before the end of the year, it said. It has also already opened information centers in Jakarta, Mumbai and Paris, and is to open one in Vancouver next month and in Manila in December, it said. Next year, it would also open offices in Amsterdam, Dubai and Sydney, it added. While the Cabinet did not mention international tourists in its
NEXT LEVEL: The defense ministry confirmed that a video released last month featured personnel piloting new FPV drone systems being developed by the Armaments Bureau Taipei and Washington are pushing for their drone companies to work together to establish a China-free supply chain, the Financial Times reported on Friday. A delegation of high-level executives and US government officials were yesterday to arrive in Taipei to discuss with their Taiwanese counterparts collaboration on drone technology procurement and development, the report said. The executives represent 26 US manufacturers of drone and counter-drone systems, while the officials are from the US Department of Commerce and the US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit, along with Dev Shenoy, principal director for microelectronics in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense
SECURITY: The New Zealand and Australian navies also sailed military vessels through the Strait yesterday to assert the right of freedom of navigation The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force on Wednesday made its first-ever transit through the Taiwan Strait in response to the intrusion by a Chinese reconnaissance aircraft into Japan’s sovereign airspace last month, Yomiuri Shimbun reported yesterday. The Japanese news platform reported that the destroyer JS Sazanamisailed down through the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday, citing sources in the Japanese government with knowledge of the matter. Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi declined to comment on the reports at a regular briefing because they concern military operations. Military vessels from New Zealand and Australia also sailed through the Strait on the same day, Wellington’s defense ministry
SOVEREIGNTY EMPHASIZED: President William Lai said that Taiwan ‘absolutely will not sign’ an agreement with Beijing implying that the nation is part of China Taiwan hopes to join like-minded nations under the democratic umbrella and jointly counter authoritarian aggression, President William Lai (賴清德) said in a prerecorded speech during the annual Concordia Summit in New York on Tuesday. Lai addressed the summit via video at Concordia’s invitation, using the opportunity to speak on the issue of Chinese aggression toward Taiwan and Beijing’s distortion of UN Resolution 2758. Lai’s comments came on the heels of the 79th session of the UN General Assembly, which opened on Tuesday. China has “distorted” UN Resolution 2758 “in support of its ‘one China’ principle,” he said. Through its misinterpretation