"Good morning, it's time to get up!"
Chang Wen-ying (張溫鷹), the DPP mayor of Taichung, accompanied by the media, had gone to the underpass near Taichung Train Station to wake up a group of homeless people at 5am and offer them breakfast. Of course, there's no such thing as a free breakfast these days. Chang asked the homeless to work for their food -- by cleaning up a park.
Taichung's new policy on the homeless took effect on Oct. 11. Since then, Mayor Chang, Taiwan's Iron Lady, has visited the places where the homeless usually spend the night to deliver the solemn message that she will "clean up the city." She declared in front of the local TV cameras that, from now on, officials will round up and detain homeless people from 11pm until 3am every day until there are no more homeless people in Taichung.
Chang, who so bravely helped Shih Ming-teh (施明德), former chairman of the DPP, escape arrest by the KMT during the martial law era, is facing a critical challenge to her efforts to win reelection from KMT political star Jason Hu (胡志強), the former minister of foreign affairs. The former human rights campaigner has made an about-face from her earlier political beliefs, turning to the "mainstream opinion" of the middle classes in a bid to maximize her votes in next year's election.
But she is naive if she thinks that her plan will be a huge success. It is time for those politicians who rose to power from prison cells to learn how to protect the human rights of non-politicians.
In Chang's eyes, most homeless people are too lazy to work. She wakes up those who look "normal" -- meaning those who are neither handicapped nor elderly, and tells them to go back home to "prevent an increase in social disorder," or, simply to get a job and earn a living for themselves.
She is not the only person in Taiwan who is strongly biased against the homeless. According to an official survey, 91.5 percent of Taiwan's "opinion leaders" think homeless people "cause the crime rate to surge," mess up the environment and spread diseases, while 56 percent of homeless people consider themselves a problem to society.
Homelessness remains one of the most misunderstood and least documented social issues of our time. Even in the US, many people refuse to believe that up to 2 million people were homeless during 1999 and 400,000 homeless families live in the richest country in the world. It is not surprising that in Taiwan, the hardworking people who have made possible the country's "economic miracle"with limited natural resources, have little sympathy for a mere 2,000 transient men and women.
There are four times more homeless men in Taiwan than women, and the average age of homeless people is 46. It is lucky that the figures are so small, given that the current number of unemployed in Taiwan is about 300,000. This is partly thanks to traditional Confucian notions of community, in which family links are strong. By the same token, however, it is also in keeping with Confucian ideology to point fingers at those whose marriages have failed or who have encountered other problems in their life.
Domestic violence is a primary cause of women finding themselves out on the street, even though they face the danger of being raped. Almost 30 percent of the homeless are mentally ill. They can't find homes or shelters because nobody wants to live with mental disorder, even members of their own family.
Under martial law, the police's homeless policy was to "detain, arrest and take into custody." Today, President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), the very man who announced the drafting of a human rights law in his inauguration speech, will discover that local officials' policies toward the homeless are not much improved.
Chang's breakfast idea seems to be little more than an opportunity to laugh at the homeless. She offered them kindness under the media spotlight, and then asked city officials to detain the homeless at midnight. What a good Samaritan.
She didn't send the homeless to shelters, for there are only 8 shelters in Taiwan with a total of only 200 beds. The shelter in Taichung can accommodate no more than 10 people.
Chang probably thinks that homeless see the shelters as a sort of paradise. She probably wonders: "Why should the government spend the money of hard-working taxpayers to look after these people who cannot be bothered to work for themselves?" To Chang, the best way to make them go home and lead a "normal life" is to take pictures of the homeless. If necessary, "the police will visit their homes and ask their families to take them back," she said.
Although 70 percent of the homeless agree that humans need a home and a family, 50 percent of them do not wish to return home. They are not much safer in shelters than on the street. Forty-five percent of homeless people in Taiwan have health problems, 33 to 50 percent have psychological problems and 20 percent of them are handicapped. Most people who are put in shelters run away at the first opportunity.
As Japan's rate of homelessness increased after its 1992 economic crisis, so Taiwan's rising unemployment rate can only add to the problem. If all politicians insisted on acting like Chang, asking the homeless "to find a job and go home instead of lying around on the street, creating social problems," Taiwan could hardly continue to lay claim to being an exemplary country when it comes to respect for human rights.
Cheryl Lai is the news editor of the Taipei Times.
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