People affected by forced relocations across the nation and their supporters yesterday congregated outside the Executive Yuan building in Taipei, demanding that the authorities protect housing rights.
Led by the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, the protesters included members of nearly a dozen associations launched to combat forced relocations and land expropriations, including the Losheng Sanatorium Self-Help Organization, the Alliance of Taoyuan Aerotropolis Residents against Forced Eviction, Sanying Aboriginal Community and the Shaoxing Community Self-Help Organization among others.
The protesters chanted slogans and waved flags outside the Executive Yuan building and burned a large map marked with the locations of seizures across the nation as mayors from the nation’s six special municipalities held a weekly meeting inside.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
“The flames of anger shall ignite battles across the land,” the demonstrators shouted as they flung handfuls of ceremonial money in the air in an act of protest.
They urged the mayors to follow through on promises made during their election campaigns last year, given that three mayors — Taipei’s Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), Greater Taoyuan’s Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) and Greater Taichung’s Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) — signed a petition to put an end to forced relocations.
“Although the nine-in-one elections have ended, forced relocation in various counties and cities across the nation have continued,” Taiwan Urban Renewal Victims’ Association president Peng Lung-san (彭龍三) said.
The groups reiterated their request for housing rights to be written into the Constitution, which was one of the main demands by the Housing Movement in October last year, when thousands of demonstrators camped out for a night on Taipei’s Renai Road to protest soaring housing prices and inadequate housing policies.
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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