Danhu Pasavi’s Bunun tribe has lived in the mountains of Kaohsiung County for more than three centuries, but now he fears Typhoon Morakot could tear them from the land of their ancestors.
Like most of the typhoon’s victims, he is a member of one of the nation’s Aboriginal tribes who lived here for thousands of years before the Han Chinese came in the 17th century — and whose spiritual attachment to the land runs deep.
“That’s why some of our older villagers would rather risk their lives staying behind than leave the village,” Pasavi, an elder in his village of 400, said at a Buddhist temple being used to shelter homeless typhoon victims.
PHOTO: PETER PARKS, AFP
Most Aboriginal typhoon survivors want the government to assure them they can ultimately return home, Pasavi said.
“Forcing us to relocate to the city permanently is no different from killing us,” said Pasavi, who had to flee from his village of Nanshalu (南沙魯) to neighboring Cishan Township (旗山). “Our ancestors arrived here even before the Han did. We deserve the right to preserve our land, our culture, history and way of life.”
Taiwanese Aborigines are ethnic Austronesians with linguistic and genetic ties to the people of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Madagascar and Oceania.
Elsewhere in Cishan at a rescue center, 20 members of Dakanuwa Village (達卡努瓦) spent the day pleading with relatives still on the mountain to leave.
“Please, you must come down. Don’t worry, the government has promised that we will have a place to stay here,” a teenager on a mobile phone said to his father.
Rescue workers said their helicopters were ready whenever the stranded villagers accepted their help. But more than a thousand have declined.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), already under fire over his handling of the typhoon, faces a new minefield with the Aborigines’ resettlement.
Economically disadvantaged before, Aboriginal communities are now even poorer, said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Kung Wen-chi (孔文吉), an Aborigine.
The government’s only option is to pay to resettle them as close to their original villages as possible, Kung said.
“Some people have no homes, no jobs and even no family after the typhoon and they can’t pay back loans,” he said, adding that 921 Earthquake resettlement projects failed when developers lost money because victims had no cash.
Pasavi and many others blame a four-year-old government project to divert water from the Laonung River (荖濃溪) over 14.5km to the Tsengweng Reservoir for the mudslides that destroyed their villages.
The claim, however, was rejected by Water Resources Agency Director-General Chen Shen-hsien (陳伸賢), who said the water channel and mudslides were not linked.
Pasuya, a former director of National Museum of Prehistory and a member of the Tsou tribe, said Aborigines have long been neglected because of prejudice and lacked a voice in elections. At 490,000 people, they represent about 2 percent of the population.
But he said Aborigines must also acknowledge their cash crops — tea, betel nuts and wasabi root — contributed to soil erosion that may have made the mudslides even more deadly.
“Forests were cut down in the mountains so the Aboriginal people could grow more profitable crops to meet the demand of city dwellers, which hurt the ecology,” he said. “Aboriginal people should learn a painful lesson not to violate their cultural principles and hurt their land.”
At a separate setting yesterday, the KMT caucus urged the Executive Yuan to merge the nation’s 30 mountainous townships into one special mountainous district and reserve part of the land for Aborigines.
The special district should be put under the jurisdiction of the central government, which could then control land preservation and disaster relief in the townships, the caucus said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY FLORA WANG
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods