The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) has issued a yellow level travel alert for Burkina Faso because of social turmoil in the west African country, an official said yesterday.
The Burkina Faso government has imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew after armed military servicemen looted shops and sabotaged a judicial building in the country’s capital city to protest what they called an unfair court ruling, said Samuel Chen (陳士良), director-general of the ministry’s Department of African Affairs.
Student-led demonstrations in Burkina Faso have also continued unabated and even spread, contributing further to social instability, Chen said.
Those factors have led the foreign ministry to advise Taiwanese not to visit Burkina Faso, one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, for any purpose for the time being.
People who insist on going there should be sure to watch out for their personal safety, Chen said.
Meanwhile, Chen said there were few Taiwanese expatriates in another west African country, the Ivory Coast, which has been affected by violence triggered by a disputed presidential election.
The country has been in chaos for several months because its former president, Laurent Gbagbo, has refused to step down after losing an election in November last year, Chen said.
Although Alassane Ouattara has won international recognition as the legitimate winner of the election and now controls most parts of the country, fierce gunfire has still been reported in the country in recent days, Chen said.
The ministry issued a red level travel alert — the highest — for Ivory Coast late last year, urging Taiwanese to avoid traveling there.
As Taiwan does not maintain a representative office in the Ivory Coast, Taiwanese travelers must contact Taiwan’s embassy in Burkina Faso if they encounter any emergencies there, Chen said.
There are currently 12 Taiwanese families, totaling about 20 people, residing in the Ivory Coast, with most living in Abidjan, the country’s biggest city, where they run restaurants, farms and other businesses.
“All of them have resided there for many years and have maintained close contact with one another,” he said. “They are all safe and have not encountered any abnormal conditions.”
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:
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