Residents of the Atayal Aboriginal village of Hagay in Taoyuan County’s Fusing Township (復興) yesterday protested the county government’s 10-year delay in rebuilding their village after the original one was destroyed in a natural disaster.
“We want to go home! We want to go back to a real home!” Hagay residents, accompanied by rights advocates and Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Yu Mei-nu (尤美女), shouted during a news conference at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei yesterday.
“It’s been 10 years and we still live in temporary housing units,” said Tai Li-chuan (戴禮娟), a spokeswoman for the village.
Photo: CNA
“The county government never fulfilled its promise to rebuild the village for us according to our wishes,” Tai added.
The location of the original Hagay Village along the Dahan River (大漢溪) was put in danger in the 1990s because the construction of a dam altered the river’s course.
The dam collapsed in 2001 when Typhoon Nari dumped a massive amount of water in the river’s catchment area, which the dam could not handle, leaving the downstream Atayal Baling Village in ruins.
The government then resettled members of the community in Shangsule — originally only for three years — while promising to build new homes for them there. However, the houses were never built.
In addition to the delay in the reconstruction process, Hagay villagers are also not satisfied with the county government’s plan to build 17 ping (56m2) houses consisting of one room, one bathroom and one living room for each family, saying that was insufficient space for their families, Tai said.
Villagers then put forward their own plans for two or three-story houses last year, but the county government turned down the request, she said.
“The government was quick to demolish the homes of the Wangs in Shilin District (士林), Taipei City, yet it is taking so long to rebuild houses for disaster victims,” Taiwan Association for Human Rights executive member and Soochow University law professor Wu Hao-jen (吳豪人) said, referring to the Taipei City Government’s forcible eviction of a family named Wang (王) on Wednesday last week to make way for a new housing complex.
“The government always says that it acts according to the law, but if our laws are only causing people to become homeless, we don’t know what we need laws for,” Wu said.
However, Taoyuan County’s Indigenous Peoples Bureau Deputy Director Lin Ji-lung (林日龍), who also attended the news conference, rebutted the accusation.
“We have worked hard to fulfill our promise. It took us five years — from 2003 to 2008 — to complete the process of changing the land category of the planned reconstruction site from ‘forestry land’ to ‘building land,’” Lin said.
As for turning down the request to build bigger houses, Lin said that the construction method to be used in the plan initiated by the Hagay residents “is meant for transitional housing units, but we’re looking to build permanent houses.”
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS