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De facto embassy in Brunei closed over sluggish ties

Taiwan's representative office in the tiny Southeast Asian country of Brunei has been closed, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced yesterday, citing sluggish bilateral ties as the main concern which has made maintaining the diplomatic office in Brunei counter-effective.

"Brunei has been abiding by the `one China' principle, and ever since Brunei and Taiwan began setting up representative offices, Brunei has been shirking the promotion of bilateral ties," the ministry said in a media release.

"Two-way exchanges on trade, agriculture, fishing, tourism and foreign affairs have been limited. The bilateral visits between officials of the two governments have long been stalled. Brunei's relationship with Taiwan is far less close than Taipei's ties with other Southeast Asian nations," the statement said.

The Brunei office is the second overseas representative office to be shut down, following the closure of the Belarus office in January.

The foreign affairs ministry said that the closure of the representative office in Brunei was part of a series of downsizing plans for overseas representative offices aimed at making the best possible use of diplomatic resources. This is in line with a new policy by Minister of Foreign Affairs James Huang (黃志芳) to streamline the country's overseas representative offices.

Testifying in the legislature last week, Huang also proposed closing the representative office in Johannesburg, South Africa.

A ministry official, speaking on conditions of anonymity, yesterday said that Brunei's relevance in international affairs has not been significant, and it has not been able to take up any important role in commanding regional politics, particularly in relation to enhancing Taiwan's participation in the international community.

"Brunei's regional policy is embedded within ASEAN, and it seldom expresses its own ideas on regional and international affairs," the official said.

According to the CIA World Fact Book Web site, Brunei's government is a constitutional sultanate. The country has an area of 5,770km2, one-sixth the size of Taiwan, with a population of about 300,000. Brunei benefits from extensive petroleum and natural gas fields, the source of one of the highest per capita GDPs in the developing world.

The foreign affairs official said that Brunei had a heavy-handed government policy, although it has been very conservative in its foreign policy.

Taiwan established a trade mission in Brunei under the name of a private consortium in 1978, although the trade mission was only formally endorsed as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Brunei Darussalam in 1996.

In a statement on its Web site, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the mission in Kuala Lumpur, would now represent Taiwanese interests in Brunei.
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