The US has a long history of opposition to the exercise of the fundamental right to self-determination, via referendums or not.
Some of your readers as well as local politicians frequently mention Quebec as an example of the possibility in free democracies to hold referendums on core national issues. As a Quebecois, it is for me rather mind-boggling to see Taiwanese people put so much aspiration into a referendum on the independence of an independent state.
Quebecois have learned the hard way the extent of the US opposition to referendums on the self-determination of Quebec. It involved, among others, tapping the phones of our prime minister's office, repeated declarations by former US presidents Jimmy Carter and then Bill Clinton against independence, and a host of other police-style maneuvers to threaten Quebec in all possible ways, including economically.
Indeed, the US has had a very long history of opposition to the right of self-determination of many peoples, whether this right be exercised via referendum or not, and whether it be exercised by a democracy or by a people/country occupied by bloody dictators or communists. The latest noteworthy historical examples on the world stage were Lithuania, Slovenia, Croatia, Kosovo, East Timor and, of course, Palestine.
Nobel Peace Laureate Jose Ramos-Horta, East-Timor's foreign minister, for example, knows what it is like to have to fight for decades against the US anti-freedom lobby at the UN. The lobby is all the more distressing because it was against a people suffering the most significant genocide of modern history -- over a third of East Timor's population was massacred by the US-backed forces of the psychopath Suharto.
The US, for a variety of reasons, will never give up on its self-attributed "God given" right to determine who should and who should not be free from despotism and tyranny.
But should the Taiwanese care so much about the US and its "Paals"? There are indeed successful examples of how to go around the US' ugly lobby against those who seek freedom from fascist regimes, and of how to go about exercising the fundamental right to build a national consensus on core issues, via referendums or other means.
Instead of Quebec (although our leaders had also studied these cases and adopted international recognition strategies), the focus of the myriad of Taiwanese civic and political groups seeking the possibility for Taiwan to exercise its right to determine its own future should be on countries like Slovenia, a small country which splendidly smashed the myth of the "one Yugoslavia" defended by the US and China at the UN.
Of course, US President George W. Bush could easily help deal the fatal blow to China's unbelievable and dangerous insistence on the "one China" myth. A single call to the leaders of Japan and South Korea to say let's get serious and get rid of the bullshit -- tomorrow we together call Chinese President Hu Jintao (
And lose the US, South Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese investment money that currently sustains the Chinese Communist Party? The UN would follow suit soon enough.
But that is a dream, right? The US will not fully work in your interest even though it has the infamous Taiwan Relations Act. So the alternative is to work from outside the framework of the UN to get other major UN members to agree on your self-chosen destiny, and to focus on a strategy that works its way around the US, as did Slovenia and others.
I'll spare you the details -- let Taiwan's government and politicians work them out, and let Taiwan's non-governmental organizations, civil society groups and other lobby groups finally do their homework and start opening their eyes to other realities than that of the whim of the US.
In the end, you may realize that even though American Institute in Taiwan Director Douglas Paal is probably not your best kind of "pal," it doesn't really matter. If you can have your case solidly built, as others did, you will finally be able to do away with the "one China" myth so useful to US and other interests. Such an undertaking would, as Congressman Sherrod Brown suggested in the case of the World Health Organization (WHO), go a long way in helping your international friends (like the US) support you in achieving a positive result in the world community's kind of psychological referendum on recognizing the status of Taiwan.
Boris Voyer is a political scientist based in Taipei and an architect of the civilian and medical lobby for Taiwan's participation in the WHO.
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