Frightened by a demolition notice posted by the Taipei County Government on Nov. 5, residents of the Sanying Aboriginal Community shaved their heads in front of the county hall yesterday, asking officials to live up to an agreement reached in March.
“We came from our faraway home villages into the city for our survival. The government never came to our aid, and is trying to kick us out of our homes,” Sanying residents and their supporters sang to an ancient Amis tune.
Five people sat on stools with a banner that read “Fight until the end” while having their heads shaved.
Tears ran down faces of some of the protesters.
The Sanying Community is located on the banks of the Dahan River (大漢溪) in Taipei County.
Most of the residents are Amis Aborigines from Hualien and Taitung Counties who work as construction workers in Taipei.
Unable to afford living in the city, they built their own homes with abandoned construction materials some 20 years ago.
However, contending that the community could be flooded, the county government ordered that the people be evicted and the community’s buildings be demolished, with the most recent demolition in February.
Determined to stay, the residents rebuilt their homes.
Weeks before the March presidential election, Sanying residents, along with Aborigines from other communities that were to be demolished, demonstrated outside the campaign headquarters of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), asking him for help.
Soon after the demonstration, KMT Taipei County Commissioner Chou Hsi-wei (周錫瑋) reached an agreement with the Aborigines during a meeting on March 13, promising to leave the Aboriginal communities untouched until “the county government finds a piece of land that is acceptable to both the government and the residents for the Aborigines to rebuild their communities,” a transcription of the meeting conclusion reads.
But a demolition notice posted by the county government on Wednesday last week frightened the residents.
“The Sanying residents build luxury homes that they can never afford by day, then return to their small, miserable houses at night, and never complained,” Chiang Yi-hao (江一豪), a Sanying Self-Help Association spokesman said. “Why can’t the government just leave them alone?”
A low-level county Water Resources Bureau official surnamed Lin explained that the demolition notice doesn’t include the residents’ houses.
“It just means that we wanted to remove structural garbage along the river that may block the flow of water,” Lin said.
However, both Lin and the Indigenous Peoples Bureau director Chu Ching-yi (朱清義) would not comment on whether the March 13 agreement is still valid. A source speaking on condition of anonymity said that a demolition of the Sanying Community could take place next month.
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