Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) headed off to Central America yesterday to attend the inauguration of Salvadorean president-elect Salvador Sanchez Ceren, a trip already embroiled in controversy.
Questions were raised last week about why Jiang was going instead of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who attended the 2009 inauguration. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was quick to note that vice presidents had led delegations to the inaugurations of El Salvador’s presidents in 1999 and 2004, so Jiang going did not imply a lower-level group was being sent.
Left unsaid was that Ma being there now would be a bit embarrassing, given that El Salvador has been rocked for the past year by investigations, both by the US Congress and its attorney general, into allegations that former Salvadorean president Francisco Flores took millions in donations from Taipei in 2003 and 2004.
At issue are checks from Taiwan written out to Flores. A Salvadorean congressional panel investigating Flores said that it could not determine what happened to US$10 million that Taipei donated between October 2003 and April 2004 or how US$15 million donated between September 2002 and December 2003 meant for development projects was used.
Flores admitted on Jan. 7 that he received about US$20 million from Taiwan that was not turned over to the government, but said the money was used for earthquake relief and efforts against drug trafficking and street gangs. His defense was not helped by his disappearance from view at the end of January.
Earlier this week, a Salvadorean judge ordered that proceedings against Flores be conducted behind closed doors and barred public comment by parties to the case. That will keep Taiwan out of Salvadorean newspapers for now, at least in connection to Flores and money. However, Flores is not the only one-time Central American leader whose ties to Taiwan — and banking deals in the US — have made headlines.
On May 23, former Guatemalan president Alfonso Portillo was sentenced in New York to five years and 10 months in prison and handed a US$2.5 million fine after pleading guilty in March to laundering US$2.5 million in bribes from Taiwan through US banks. The court found that he had accepted five checks for US$500,000 each between 1999 and 2002 and then conspired to launder the funds.
While Ma’s administration says it has eliminated “checkbook diplomacy” in favor of “flexible diplomacy,” Taiwan continues to pay the price for the previous policy. Gambian President Yahya Jammeh terminated diplomatic relations with Taipei on Nov. 14 last year, reducing the number of our diplomatic allies to 22. Reportedly the move was triggered by Taipei’s refusal to grant US$10 million in aid — in cash, directly to him.
The government says it will demand transparency and accountability in foreign relations, yet the foreign ministry’s and Taiwan’s reputations have not been enhanced by the ministry’s refusal to cooperate with the Salvadorean investigations or comment on whether Flores did receive checks — on the grounds that the issue has now entered the judicial process.
Taiwan has been obsessed with how many diplomatic allies it has compared with Beijing. It has not only cost a lot of money, but is also unwinnable, and not only because of Beijing’s manipulation. It was a losing battle from the word “go,” and by focusing on whether we were “winning,” we ignore that Taiwan has de facto diplomatic relations with scores of nations.
Taiwan is respected for its industrial, democratic and social developments in ways that China is not — and never will be under its current leadership. It is time to prove we really are flexible — and stop calculating every move in relation to Beijing.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
RSS