Taiwan desperately needs friends. Or, at least, it thinks it does. It is the small kid in a bad neighborhood with an increasingly belligerent bully living next door, and fear of being bumped off without anyone noticing has prompted the government to try and give the nation the sort of notoriety that might ensure its survival.
The country's official allies are diplomatic minnows, many of which Taiwanese haven't even heard. So to get the recognition it seeks from the big boys, the government has been trying to join their clubs.
Year after year, the government applies fruitlessly to join these organizations. It is stymied at almost every turn by China. Even when Taiwan succeeds in signing up to an organization, it is always under a pseudonym, never its own name.
For the past six years, one of the government's targets has been the World Health Organization (WHO). As the WHO was created under the auspices of the UN, of which Taiwan is no longer a member, the country attempts only to be an observer as with the International Committee of the Red Cross or the Palestinian Authority. So far, its bid has never even made it onto the agenda of the World Health Assembly, the organization's main decision-making body.
The WHO was set up, when the Republic of China held a seat on the UN Security Council, with the best of intentions, and there's no real reason why Taiwanese should not benefit from these good intentions once again. Taiwanese get sick the same as anybody else, and they travel a lot, taking disease out of the country and bringing it in. Taiwan's exclusion helps no one. The WHO derives its power and usefulness by incorporating as much of the world's population as possible.
But while a communist-led China has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, Taiwan will never join the WHO, even as an observer.
WHO, at China's behest, would sit back and let Taiwan suffer without its support, even during a disease crisis. Its inaction to the SARS cases in this country should come as a surprise to no one. It has failed to act this way before. In 1998, a new strain of enterovirus emerged in Taiwan, killing 78 young children. The country asked the WHO for help; the WHO did nothing.
This time, it is allowing WHO-member China to endanger the lives of possibly thousands of people around the world by stalling on efforts to control the spread of SARS from its probable source in Guangdong Province, while only grudgingly accepting help and information from Taiwan in monitoring cases and identifying the nature of the disease.
And to try to join this organization that puts politics before health, the government is being drawn into doing the same thing. While the argument should stick to the fact that Taiwan's 23 million people deserve the same health rights as everybody else, the Department of Health and the country's various medical associations have been complaining about WHO's listing of this country as "Taiwan, China" or some variant thereof. While this may, as they say, undermine the dignity of Taiwan's people, no link has yet been made between loss of dignity and ill health. If the health of Taiwanese was the only concern, what does it matter what the WHO calls the country?
Taiwanese will never gain the medical, nor the political, benefits of being a WHO observer. The quicker Taiwanese come to terms with this, the quicker they will be able to prepare to take care of themselves. Building national self-respect, sorely lacking in Taiwan, would go a lot further than the futile endeavor of begging at the door of international organizations. The government should stop wasting time and money trying to get into the WHO and concentrate on taking care of its own people instead.
Anna Tsai is a freelance journalist based in Taipei.
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