The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday condemned what it called discrimination against Taiwan by the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) after it declined to recognize first lady Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍) as leader of Taiwan's delegation to the Paralympic Games in Athens.
In a letter addressed to Linda Chen (陳李綢), president of Taiwan's National Paralympic Committee (NPC), on Monday, the IPC explained its policy prevented anyone who was not a serving NPC president, secretary-general or vice president from assuming team leadership at the Games.
"For this reason, the only persons entitled to NPC accreditation in the case of Chinese Taipei are: Ms. Linda Chen as the NPC President and Mr. Liu Pei-ling [
It added: "As agreed before, Ms. Wu Shu-chen and her party can be accredited as GTs [transferable guest]."
Chen, who traveled to Malaysia on Wu's behalf to apply for an NPC card in July, said she clearly told the Paralympics authorities at the time that Wu would lead Taiwan's team to the Games.
"They happily accepted that Wu is the leader of our team, not me. If they intend to oppress us by appointing me as leader of our team, I will not accept that," she told reporters.
The IPC was merely looking for an excuse in citing the regulation, ministry spokesman Michel Lu (呂慶龍) said.
"The ministry has checked the identities of leaders of Paralympic teams from 145 countries. The leaders of teams from Australia, New Zealand, Honduras, Chile, Peru, Mexico, Germany, Belgium, Nigeria, the US and South Africa do not fit the IPC accreditation policy either," he said.
"The IPC apparently discriminated against Taiwan," Lu said, adding the ministry was indignant that Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan (
China's Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman, Zhang Mingqing (
China's "irrational and inappropriate" interference in the Games was absolutely unacceptable, Lu said.
He said Wu would continue her original schedule in Athens and that the ministry supported all decisions made by Presidential Office Deputy Secretary-General James Huang (黃志芳), who is accompanying Wu.
"The IPC's bullying is unendurable. It succumbed to behind-the-scenes forces of darkness to oppress Taiwan," Huang said on Tuesday.
If the leaders of other teams to the Games had been either NPC presidents or secretaries-general, Taiwan would not have objected to the IPC's request to change the leader of Taiwan's team, Huang said.
But many others among the team leaders were neither presidents or secretaries-general, he said.
"The IPC's maneuvering is quite simply brutal," Huang added. "Is Taiwan a second-class member of the IPC?"
Taiwan's team has sent a protest letter to the IPC and requested a response be made as soon as possible, Huang said.
"We will of course not accept the GT card which the IPC offered to Wu. The cards are the lowest level of all VIP cards. It is just absurd that the IPC downgraded Wu's NPC card to a lowly GT card," he said.
The Presidential Office said yesterday that Wu made an appearance at the Paralympics Athletes Village on Tuesday to boost the Taiwanese athletes' morale in her capacity "as leader of the Taiwan team."
After the meeting, Wu visited an archeological museum in Athens in the afternoon.
She hosted a dinner banquet for seven Greek congressmen at the hotel where she is staying, a press release 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