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Ministry of Foreign Affairs to scale back some of its operations abroad

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs will scale back its operations at five sites overseas, including those in Luxembourg, Mauritius, Uruguay, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil as well as Egypt, the Taipei Times learned yesterday.

"This decision constitutes part of the government's downsizing program and it signals an upcoming redistribution of resources on the diplomatic front lines," a source said.

The ministry is slated to make a formal announcement of the plans sometime this week, the source said.

"We decided not to cut the number of overseas representative offices, as this could reduce our room to maneuver in the future," the source said.

"We simply decided, on a temporary basis, not to dispatch any personnel to these sites, and we will still be able to dispatch our forces to these locations whenever necessary," the source added.

Out of the five sites slated to be scaled back, four fall under the umbrella of Taipei's representative offices in these countries. They are offices in Luxembourg, Montevideo in Uruguay, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil as well as Port Louis in Mauritius.

Taipei will still have two representative offices in Brazil.

Only the operations in Cairo have so far been carried out in a de facto fashion, after Taipei failed to set up a representative office in the Egyptian capital on a reciprocal basis as scheduled by the end of 2000. The hang up is due to obstructionism from China, sources said.

In 2000, it was announced that Taipei and Cairo would establish economic and cultural offices by the end of the same year.

But the plans were never realized due to interference from Beijing, officials have admitted.

Instead, the foreign ministry dispatched personnel to a local hotel in Cairo to handle day-to-day business such as visa applications, officials have revealed.
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