The disappearance of eight Taiwanese businessmen in the waters off Madagascar earlier this month and their families’ attempts to contact the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help them locate the missing men highlighted the lack of an effective mechanism to offer diplomatic assistance to Taiwanese overseas.
During such emergencies, every second counts and the mechanism should have kicked into action immediately. The problem is action is not the strong suit of diplomats. Although diplomacy is an extension of domestic politics, the organizational structure of Taiwanese overseas missions has flaws, making it difficult for them to offer full assistance.
Following are some suggestions on how the ministry can quickly gain assistance-related information, set up a diplomatic assistance network and interpret vital information.
First, a call transfer system should be set up. This is easy to set up in overseas missions given continuing changes and improvements in telecommunications technologies. The cost of transferring calls using VoIP telephony, for instance, to the ministry or transferring calls from different departments of the ministry to the person on duty is not high. A call transfer system would allow foreign missions to operate 24/7 and thus bring the function of diplomatic assistance into full play.
A call transfer system is like the command center at fire and police stations, which allow emergency information or calls to be monitored at any time and dealt with instantly. Of course, the ministry can cooperate with these organizations only on the premise that there are officials taking emergency calls. The establishment of a call transfer service, in fact, means the establishment of a virtual diplomatic assistance command center.
Second, a virtual diplomatic assistance command center should be established. “Virtual” does not mean “non-existent,” but rather setting up a regional rescue network without spending money on a physical command center or expensive equipment. Taiwanese missions abroad can form a hierarchical and systematic network enabling emergency assistance and mobilization. It can also be done by establishing a virtual regional emergency assistance network in different time zones such as Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas.
As it is more difficult to quickly mobilize agencies to provide assistance overseas than at home, a virtual diplomatic assistance command center can integrate domestic and overseas assistance resources and provide diplomatic assistance. Rescue operations might not function well in some developing countries that have less developed government mechanisms for assistance because of political, economic and administrative problems. Diplomatic staffers should not use this as an excuse, but instead be even more aggressive in combining domestic and international rescue resources, thus forging official and non-official diplomatic assistance relations.
Because the nation’s diplomatic and consular staffing system is not flexible and the function of the nation’s overseas organizations is not complete, the government can take advantage of the local branches of global assistance organizations or set up and cooperate with global nonprofit, non-governmental organizations through its overseas missions to be able to respond quickly to emergencies.
In short, the government should establish a virtual diplomatic assistance command center to connect all existing networks and make use of domestic and international resources to offset the defects of the current emergency assistance mechanism.
Yang Yung-nane is a political science professor and vice dean of the College of Social Sciences at Cheng Kung University.
Translated by Ted Yang
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