The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday urged Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to meet a US ultimatum to leave his country and avert the imminent outbreak of US-led war against his country.
"It's our hope that Iraq will follow UN Resolution 1441 to disarm and destroy weapons of mass destruction swiftly," said ministry spokesman Richard Shih (
"We hope Saddam will leave his country within 48 hours," Shih said, echoing the demand by US President George W. Bush made yesterday.
Shih reiterated the government's support for what he termed a "US-led war on terrorism on a global scale."
Despite the government's apparently firm backing of a campaign to oust Saddam, Shih said Taiwan is a "peace-loving" country and "the last thing we want to see is the outbreak of war."
A senior foreign official at the department of West Asian affairs urged Taiwanese near possible areas of conflict to "book a flight as soon as possible" before the 48-hour US ultimatum comes to an end.
Shih said the ministry has yet to come up with a definite timetable for a compulsory evacuation of Taiwanese in the region.
According to the ministry's statistics as of Monday, around 1,762 ROC passport holders -- including diplomats, businesspeople, students and technical mission members and their families -- are based in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, the United Arabic Emirates, Israel, Kuwait and Bahrain.
Meanwhile, the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation has begun humanitarian aid targeted at the large number of Iraqi refugees expected to flood into Jordan in the wake of a war against Baghdad, foundation staffers said.
"The United Nations estimated that around 1 million Iraqis will sweep into Jordan, while the local government intends to control the number of refugees under 50,000," Chen Chiou-hwa (
Fresh from a coordination meeting with the Hashemite Jordanian Charity Organization for Arab and Islamic Relief Development and Cooperation yesterday, Chen said Tzu Chi's voluntary workers would start building tents in a refugee camp on the Iraq-Jordan border today.
The Tzu Chi charity foundation's headquarters in Hualien has sent US$100,000 to its office in Jordan to finance food and equipment aid for any urgent humanitarian crisis in the wake of war, said Joe Wang (王運進), key coordinator for the Jordan project.
The foundation has prepared two containers with 15,000 blankets and canned food to send to Jordan to boost the humanitarian resources available to the Jordan office, Wang said.
Tzu Chi's office in Jordan delivers food to the country's poor and refugees at 13 sites, while the outbreak of war would make incoming Iraqi refugees its top priority, Chen said.
The WHO has estimated that as many as 500,000 people could need treatment for direct or indirect injuries in the wake of war in Iraq.
The Jordanian charity organization, a national institution for charitable work, has been coordinating various charity groups for their work in lending a hand to cope with the imminent humanitarian crisis in the wake of war.
World Vision Taiwan announced yesterday in a press release that it planned to collect US$50,000 to help the international Christian charity group's participation to handle a humanitarian crisis following the war.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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