The Presidential Office yesterday said it hoped the international community would respect the country's judicial procedures and trust its democratic foundations, for which the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and thousands of people had fought for decades.
"We hope the international community can understand that the requests made by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
"Some foreign media said that Taiwan's government rejected the pan-blue camp's requests. That is not correct. The government cannot violate the constitutional mechanism, which will just hurt the country's legal system," Wu said.
Wu said that the opposition alliance had a right to launch legal proceedings against the result of the presidential election, but added that the pan-blue camp's leaders should stop its supporters' irrational actions.
"Taiwan's democratic achievements have been credited by the international community, and the international media have praised past elections for being fair and just," Wu said.
"The approach the pan-blue camp is taking right now shows a lack of confidence in Taiwan's judiciary and is reminiscent of how it manipulated the legal system under the previous KMT government," he said.
The pan-blue camp's strategy of neither accepting the election result nor trusting the judicial processes has harmed the country's democratic reputation, Wu said.
"For the time being we must tolerate any provocative actions and just keep calm to prevent any possible conflict between our supporters and the protesters from the pan-blue camp," Wu said.
He also reminded the international community that the pan-blue camp had failed to present any concrete evidence for its accusation of vote-rigging and said that Lien might not be able to end the protests rationally.
"It is easy to call on people to protest in the streets, but it is difficult to call off the demonstrations peacefully," Wu said.
According to an anonymous DPP source, top aides to the president called an emergency meeting after Lien announced that he did not accept the election result and was hoping to have it annulled.
"We realized that this was an unhappy victory, because there would be an emotional reaction from the losers," the aide said yesterday.
"Three steps are necessary to deal with the challenge: First, to prevent any form of conflict; Second, to resolve the event in accordance with judicial processes, which may take months, and finally, President Chen has to personally heal the divisions between ethnic communities," the aide said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS