A ground-breaking ceremony was held on Thursday for a Taiwan-funded refugee center in Turkey near the border with war-torn Syria.
At the ceremony for the Reyhanli Centre for World Citizens in Hatay Province, Celalettin Guvenc, president of the Turkish parliament’s internal affairs committee, expressed his gratitude to Taiwan, saying that although the nation is about 8,000km away and most Taiwanese are of a different religious persuasion to most Turks, they share the same humanitarian values.
The Turkish lawmaker said with the provision of the financial aid to build the refugee center, Taiwan was showing that Turkey does not have to deal with the refugee crisis on its border alone.
Since Syria plunged into civil war in 2011, almost 120,000 refugees have fled to Reyhanli.
As the Turkish city has a population of about 100,000, the proportion of refugees to the local population is highest among all the cities along the border with Syria.
Reyhanli Mayor Mehmet Hacioglu said that the refugee center has been planned for years and its construction is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year.
Hacioglu said that the project is expected to create jobs, boost prosperity and improve tourism.
The mayor said he believes that the project would help increase the appeal of Reyhanli.
The Taiwanese government has provided all of the funding to build the refugee center, but the financial terms were not immediately available.
The project was pushed by Representative to Turkey Yaser Cheng (鄭泰祥) and former Reyhanli mayor Huseyin Sanverdi.
The center is being built on a 2,000m2 plot of land and when completed it is to have 52 multipurpose rooms for the use of Syrian refugees, including for art creation and display, as well as reading and learning.
Taiwan, which has already established a school for Syrian refugees in Turkey, has been generous in providing the financial aid and it has become a role model in terms of international humanitarian assistance, Sanverdi said.
Taiwan has worked closely with the Turkish government to help Syrian refugees, not only in Hatay Province, but also in Sanliurfa and Gaziantep provinces, Cheng said.
Taiwan-based charity group the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation has also been active Istanbul, providing healthcare and education assistance, Cheng added.
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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