The Kingdom of Eswatini and Russia have named their top envoys to Taiwan, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
Eswatini Prime Minister Cleopas Dlamini on Friday announced that Promise Sithembiso Msibi, then-ambassador to the African Union, is to replace Thamie Dlamini as the nation’s ambassador to Taiwan, said Yang Syin-yi (楊心怡), director of the ministry’s Department of West Asian and African Affairs.
Thamie Dlamini has been appointed Eswatini’s representative to the UN, Yang added.
Photo: Eswatini Government’S Twitter account
Msibi, 57, had visited Taiwan twice, as a parliamentary secretary in 2004, and to accompany King Mswati III’s mother to attend Taiwan’s Double Ten National Day celebrations in 2011, Yang said.
Msibi is highly trusted by King Mswati III, making him a good choice as Eswatini’s ambassador to Taiwan, he said, adding that the African kingdom has not yet announced when he is to arrive in Taiwan.
Yury Metelev, Russia’s new top envoy, arrived in Taiwan on Oct. 12 to take up his post as representative of the Moscow-Taipei Coordination Commission on Economic and Cultural Cooperation, Yang said.
Photo: Lu Yi-hsuan, Taipei Times
Metelev, 60, had served as the deputy head of the Russian Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad and International Humanitarian Cooperation.
He speaks fluent Chinese, English and Slovak, Yang said.
In related news, former vice president Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) is to attend a democracy forum this week in Lithuania, and deliver a speech on Taiwan’s democracy and achievements in the latest sign of growing ties between Taipei and Vilnius, the ministry said in a statement on Monday.
Chen is to appear at the “Future of Democracy” forum in Vilnius, which is being held on Friday and Saturday, at the invitation of Lithuanian Minister for Foreign Affairs Gabrielius Landsbergis, it said.
The former vice president is also to talk about Taiwan’s COVID-19 prevention experience and its response to disinformation in his speech titled “Taiwan as a Litmus Case for Democracy,” it said.
The forum “is convened in response to the worrying trends of contracting democratic space and authoritarian entrenchment,” the Lithuanian foreign ministry’s Web site said.
Prior to his arrival in Lithuania, Chen is to stop in Poland to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial at the site of the biggest concentration camp run by Nazi Germany during World War II.
Chen, who was the nation’s vice president from 2016 to last year, is now an academician at Academia Sinica.
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