Angry residents of the Saowac Aboriginal Community yesterday protested at the Executive Yuan in Taipei for a second day after their homes were demolished by the Taoyuan County Government yesterday morning.
Police removed the demonstrators at 8pm last night.
The protesters said they would spend the night at the Kanjin (崁津) community in Taoyuan County and pledged to return to protest again on Thursday.
They demanded that Council for Indigenous Peoples (CIP) Minister Chang Jen-hsiang (章仁香) step down and called on Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) to give them back their homes.
The protesters also accused Taoyuan County Commissioner Eric Chu (朱立倫) of being “an oppressor of Aborigines.”
The Saowac Aboriginal Community is located on the banks of the Dahan River (大漢溪) in Dasi Township (大溪), Taoyuan County. All of its residents are Amis from Hualien and Taitung Counties who migrated there about 30 years ago to work as construction workers. As they could not afford housing in the city, they built their own homes on undeveloped land along the river.
However, the county government issued a demolition notice in December. The Water Conservation Act (水利法) outlaws the building of houses in the area, since it is classified as a “flood zone.”
When Saowac residents demonstrated outside the Executive Yuan on Thursday, asking the central government to intervene, CIP Vice Minister Wang Chin-fa (王進發), an Atayal Aborigine, promised to negotiate with the Taoyuan County Government for a better solution in a week.
Despite the promise, a county demolition team escorted by about 100 police officers moved into Saowac yesterday morning and flattened the village.
“We thought that the CIP would speak for us and help us after what Wang promised us, but it was just an empty promise,” Aboriginal activist Panai Luni told reporters. “About 20 of us lay on the ground, but the police moved us by force and quickly destroyed Saowac.”
“It’s such a cold day today, but the government made these old people homeless,” Panai added. “What kind of government is this?”
The homeless Saowac residents brought blankets, sleeping bags, pots, a stove, vegetables and tents with them to the demonstration.
“This is all that’s left of our homes,” Saowac Church preacher Chang Chin-tsai (張進財) said, holding up a broken door.
“We ask that the Executive Yuan give us a place to stay, or we will stay right here,” Chang said.
Escorted by the police, Wang appeared at the protest site at around 5pm and tried to explain that he had meant what he said on Thursday and had been negotiating with the Taoyuan County Government yesterday morning, but his speech was interrupted several times.
Wang repeatedly said that he was also an Aborigine, but demonstrators shouted at him: “You’re a traitor! A pet of the Han people! How can you call yourself an Aborigine?”
The Taoyuan County Government yesterday defended the demolition.
“We posted the notice in December. We didn’t act right away because we wanted them to spend their Lunar New Year holidays in peace,” county water department official Yeh Meng-fen (葉孟芬) said.
“They were living there illegally, so we had to do something,” Yeh said.
“We are trying to help them — we’ll pay them compensation of between NT$5,000 and NT$30,000, and will provide them with job training as well,” the official said.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching