Taiwan's representative office in the tiny Southeast Asian country of Brunei has been closed, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced yesterday, citing sluggish bilateral ties as the main concern which has made maintaining the diplomatic office in Brunei counter-effective.
"Brunei has been abiding by the `one China' principle, and ever since Brunei and Taiwan began setting up representative offices, Brunei has been shirking the promotion of bilateral ties," the ministry said in a media release.
"Two-way exchanges on trade, agriculture, fishing, tourism and foreign affairs have been limited. The bilateral visits between officials of the two governments have long been stalled. Brunei's relationship with Taiwan is far less close than Taipei's ties with other Southeast Asian nations," the statement said.
The Brunei office is the second overseas representative office to be shut down, following the closure of the Belarus office in January.
The foreign affairs ministry said that the closure of the representative office in Brunei was part of a series of downsizing plans for overseas representative offices aimed at making the best possible use of diplomatic resources. This is in line with a new policy by Minister of Foreign Affairs James Huang (黃志芳) to streamline the country's overseas representative offices.
Testifying in the legislature last week, Huang also proposed closing the representative office in Johannesburg, South Africa.
A ministry official, speaking on conditions of anonymity, yesterday said that Brunei's relevance in international affairs has not been significant, and it has not been able to take up any important role in commanding regional politics, particularly in relation to enhancing Taiwan's participation in the international community.
"Brunei's regional policy is embedded within ASEAN, and it seldom expresses its own ideas on regional and international affairs," the official said.
According to the CIA World Fact Book Web site, Brunei's government is a constitutional sultanate. The country has an area of 5,770km2, one-sixth the size of Taiwan, with a population of about 300,000. Brunei benefits from extensive petroleum and natural gas fields, the source of one of the highest per capita GDPs in the developing world.
The foreign affairs official said that Brunei had a heavy-handed government policy, although it has been very conservative in its foreign policy.
Taiwan established a trade mission in Brunei under the name of a private consortium in 1978, although the trade mission was only formally endorsed as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Brunei Darussalam in 1996.
In a statement on its Web site, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the mission in Kuala Lumpur, would now represent Taiwanese interests in Brunei.
Police have issued warnings against traveling to Cambodia or Thailand when others have paid for the travel fare in light of increasing cases of teenagers, middle-aged and elderly people being tricked into traveling to these countries and then being held for ransom. Recounting their ordeal, one victim on Monday said she was asked by a friend to visit Thailand and help set up a bank account there, for which they would be paid NT$70,000 to NT$100,000 (US$2,136 to US$3,051). The victim said she had not found it strange that her friend was not coming along on the trip, adding that when she
TRAGEDY: An expert said that the incident was uncommon as the chance of a ground crew member being sucked into an IDF engine was ‘minuscule’ A master sergeant yesterday morning died after she was sucked into an engine during a routine inspection of a fighter jet at an air base in Taichung, the Air Force Command Headquarters said. The officer, surnamed Hu (胡), was conducting final landing checks at Ching Chuan Kang (清泉崗) Air Base when she was pulled into the jet’s engine for unknown reasons, the air force said in a news release. She was transported to a hospital for emergency treatment, but could not be revived, it said. The air force expressed its deepest sympathies over the incident, and vowed to work with authorities as they
A tourist who was struck and injured by a train in a scenic area of New Taipei City’s Pingsi District (平溪) on Monday might be fined for trespassing on the tracks, the Railway Police Bureau said yesterday. The New Taipei City Fire Department said it received a call at 4:37pm on Monday about an incident in Shifen (十分), a tourist destination on the Pingsi Railway Line. After arriving on the scene, paramedics treated a woman in her 30s for a 3cm to 5cm laceration on her head, the department said. She was taken to a hospital in Keelung, it said. Surveillance footage from a
INFRASTRUCTURE: Work on the second segment, from Kaohsiung to Pingtung, is expected to begin in 2028 and be completed by 2039, the railway bureau said Planned high-speed rail (HSR) extensions would blanket Taiwan proper in four 90-minute commute blocs to facilitate regional economic and livelihood integration, Railway Bureau Deputy Director-General Yang Cheng-chun (楊正君) said in an interview published yesterday. A project to extend the high-speed rail from Zuoying Station in Kaohsiung to Pingtung County’s Lioukuaicuo Township (六塊厝) is the first part of the bureau’s greater plan to expand rail coverage, he told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). The bureau’s long-term plan is to build a loop to circle Taiwan proper that would consist of four sections running from Taipei to Hualien, Hualien to
RSS