Ahead of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) scheduled apology to the nation’s Aborigines on behalf of the government tomorrow, the results of a poll released yesterday indicated that Aborigines and non-Aborigines have differing ideas about which issues the government should prioritize.
For the first time, the nation’s leader is to officially apologize for the injustices that the governments of Taiwan have perpetrated against Aborigines, as a step toward reconciliation and transitional justice.
However, the results of a poll conducted by the Taiwan Thinktank show that people of different ethnic backgrounds have different ideas on the most important aspects of transitional justice for Aborigines.
When asked to name the most pressing issue facing Aboriginal communities, 43.8 percent of respondents said that solving the nation’s unequal distribution of resources is the most urgent issue, while 29.1 percent said promulgating legislation that protects Aboriginal land rights, and 21.2 percent of the respondents said Aboriginal autonomy.
However, breaking down the respondents according to ethnic division, while 43.8 percent of ethnic Taiwanese and 49 percent of Hakkas identified the unequal distribution of resources as a priority, 63.2 percent of Aboriginal respondents considered protection of land rights the top issue, while Aboriginal autonomy was also well-supported.
“The poll results are very interesting, because we can see how Aborigines and non-Aborigines think differently,” New Power Party Legislator Kawlo Iyun Pacidal, an Amis Aborigine, said at a news conference in Taipei to release the poll results.
“This is why so many Aborigines have taken to the streets today [yesterday], because, while they think it is positive that the president is to apologize, they they want to make sure that Tsai is aware of the issues that they care about,” she added.
Although an official apology might be historically significant, “apologizing is simple; what’s more challenging is the reconciliation process that follows,” Pacidal said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS