By Jenny W. Hsu
Staff Reporter
The Taiwan AIDS Foundation yesterday panned the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (MOFA) slow response after the organizers of the 2008 International AIDS Conference, held in Mexico last week, labeled Taiwan as a “province of China.”
MOFA rejected the accusation, saying that the Taiwanese representative to Mexico protested to the organizers on the first day of the meeting and was successful in getting them to remove “province of China” from the roster for the remainder of the meeting.
In an interview with the Taipei Times yesterday, Taiwan’s AIDS Foundation specialist Bevis Tseng (曾壹靖) said they informed MOFA immediately after they learned of the incorrect name, “but MOFA did not bother to contact us until the night the delegation was on its way to the airport heading to Mexico.”
“We contacted the Department of Central and South American Affairs as soon as we found out about the name issue, but MOFA did not do anything for a few days and when they did call, they complained that we didn’t notify them in a timely fashion,” he said.
Tseng said the foundation also contacted the organizers to change the name but their efforts were ignored.
MOFA, however, argued that it was the foundation that neglected to notify the ministry on time.
“MOFA was not informed of the issue right away. But as soon as we heard about the problem, our colleagues protested to the organizers and the host country demanding the error be corrected immediately,” said David Wu (吳建國), deputy head of the Department of NGO Affairs, saying that one of the ministry’s foremost tasks is to safeguard Taiwan’s national dignity.
Diego Chou (周麟), deputy head of the Department of Central and South American Affairs’ said Taiwan’s representative to Mexico Chen Hsin-tung (陳新東) accompanied the foundation president in lodging a protest to the organizers on the first day of the meeting.
Chou said the organizers agreed to make a change by erasing “province” from the country’s title.
Tseng said that though neither the organizers nor the host country apologized for the mishap or agreed to change the name, the Taiwanese flag was displayed and distributed at the conference without any trouble.
The foundation’s booth at the “Asia Zone” of the Global Village exhibit was also very well received, he said.
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