Anybody who believed the findings of the Control Yuan’s investigation into who was responsible for the infamous decision initially to refuse foreign material aid in the aftermath of Typhoon Morakot will probably also be waiting up on Thursday night hoping to glimpse Santa Claus and his reindeer.
Wednesday’s report — which reads like a student’s excuse for not doing homework — censured the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) for issuing the refusal while putting the blame for the decision to refuse offers of foreign disaster rescue expertise at the feet of Director-General of the National Fire Administration Huang Chi-min (黃季敏), deputy commander of the Central Emergency Operation Center when the typhoon struck.
While Huang may indeed — as has been reported — have suggested that no foreign rescue aid was required, it is stretching the boundaries of belief to suggest that the MOFA then issued a memo to the nation’s embassies and representative offices without getting the go-ahead from a more senior government official.
While former deputy foreign minister Andrew Hsia (夏立言) became the sacrificial lamb over the memo, the real decision maker has managed to remain hidden. This is scandalous as the delay in the arrival of foreign rescue aid without doubt contributed to deaths that could have otherwise been avoided.
The Control Yuan’s investigation and subsequent corrective measures can be seen as the government’s attempt to close the file on the Morakot disaster. They suggest that no government official will actually be held accountable for what was a gross dereliction of duty by government officials on so many different levels.
The government watchdog has once again failed to perform to its remit.
If the Control Yuan was serious about its work and if its members actually felt any remorse for the hundreds of deaths caused by Morakot it should be finding out why — if its conclusions are to believed — such low-level staffers were allowed to make such a crucial decision, impeaching those responsible and making sure that it never happens again. While doing so, it could also investigate why, if Hsia was so negligent in his duties, he was then given a cushy job as the nation’s representative to Indonesia and whether this was a pay off for him taking the fall over the memo.
But one shouldn’t expect too much from the Control Yuan. After all, this was the same body that initially refused to impeach repugnant former Government Information Office official Kuo Kuan-ying (郭冠英), only doing so after a public outcry. This is also the same Control Yuan that found a lowly engineer responsible for the Maokong Gondola fiasco.
While the idea of the Control Yuan has noble ambitions, Taiwan’s fiercely polarized political climate means that those ideals have been corrupted. This is why the Control Yuan sat idle for more than three years after former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) nominees were stonewalled by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-dominated legislature and why three DPP-affiliated members nominated by Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) were rejected last year.
This is also why the current body and its majority of pan-blue sympathizers cannot effectively deal with accusations of government impropriety, no matter how serious they may be.
Until this problem is remedied, we can look forward to more of the same from the government’s toothless watchdog.
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
A response to my article (“Invite ‘will-bes,’ not has-beens,” Aug. 12, page 8) mischaracterizes my arguments, as well as a speech by former British prime minister Boris Johnson at the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei early last month. Tseng Yueh-ying (曾月英) in the response (“A misreading of Johnson’s speech,” Aug. 24, page 8) does not dispute that Johnson referred repeatedly to Taiwan as “a segment of the Chinese population,” but asserts that the phrase challenged Beijing by questioning whether parts of “the Chinese population” could be “differently Chinese.” This is essentially a confirmation of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formulation, which says that
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed. Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records. For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase
RSS