President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) will make a 12-day trip to Africa next month to visit four diplomatic allies, in his first overseas trip since winning re-election in January, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
Ma will visit Burkina Faso, Gambia, Swaziland and Sao Tome and Principe, making transit stops in Dubai, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Shen Ssu-tsun (沈斯淳) told a press conference at the Presidential Office.
The trip, from April 7 to April 18, will be Ma’s first visit to Africa since becoming president in 2008.
He visited Central and South America in 2009, and was originally scheduled to visit the four African allies in March last year, but the trip was postponed after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and mass protests in North Africa.
Shen said Ma will visit hospitals, schools and factories that Taiwan has helped build and will inspect cooperative projects in agriculture, medicine and education. He will also meet with Taiwanese businesspeople during the trip.
“The trip aims to solidify diplomatic ties, deepen bilateral understanding and review various joint projects undertaken by both sides,” Shen said.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Timothy Yang (楊進添), government officials, legislators and a performance troupe from an arts university will accompany Ma. First lady Chow Mei-ching (周美青) will not make the trip.
Ma will only transit through Dubai, Shen said, dismissing a story in the Chinese-language China Times that he would make transit stops in Singapore and meet with politicians there.
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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