When it comes to Taiwan’s international participation, there is never a shortage of verbal support from its diplomatic allies and other nations, but a growing number of international organizations appear to be turning their backs on their founding principles to be at Beijing’s beck and call, and exclude Taiwan.
This year is the 15th anniversary of the SARS epidemic, which began in China’s Guangdong Province in late 2002 and infected more than 8,000 people, killing 774 in 29 countries and areas the following year, including Taiwan.
The government and private groups have repeatedly cited SARS as proof that disease knows no borders to support their argument that the WHO shutting its door to a nation of 23 million people could create a blind spot in the global effort to combat pandemics.
Despite failing to help the nation secure an invitation to last year’s World Health Assembly (WHA), the nation’s “Leave No One Behind” campaign created much sympathy and prompted more nations to speak out in its support.
With less than two months to go until this year’s WHA, representatives from scores of Taiwan-friendly nations have been lobbying WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom to allow Taiwan to attend the convention in Geneva, Switzerland.
At a banquet in Taipei on Wednesday, Alex Wong (黃之瀚), deputy assistant secretary at the US State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, also called for an end to the “unjust exclusion” of Taiwan from the international arena.
As Taiwan has much to share in the areas of public health, humanitarian relief and sustainable development, denying it a global voice would be “not only unjust for Taiwan, but unjust for every country and every individual in need who could benefit from Taiwan’s contributions,” he said.
As much as the government appreciates the show of support from Wong and others, they can only do so much at a time when UN organizations such as the WHO and the International Civil Aviation Organization seem to have decided that it is more important not to be on Beijing’s bad side than to fulfill their raison d’etre of preventing diseases and ensuring aviation safety.
Their perspective highlights a more serious problem: Humans have a tendency to grow numb to injustice.
This has been demonstrated with the continued forcible deportation of Taiwanese fraud suspects to China. When the first such deportation occurred in April 2016, many were furious at Beijing’s disregard of basic human rights in flying Taiwanese from Kenya to Beijing, but as more cases were reported, the suspects stopped being seen as individuals and became just numbers that hardly anyone talks about.
The same situation has already begun for Taiwan on the global stage. Once Beijing’s isolation tactics and Taipei’s resulting protests are seen as the norm, outsiders might see them as commonplace and lose interest. The nation’s bids for international participation and protests against unfair treatment could be dismissed as periodic background noise that is unlikely to result in substantial changes.
Such a path for Taiwan is likely, unless its allies are willing to lobby for its participation in international organizations as hard as they fight for their own national interests, instead of treating it as some kind of formality.
Of course, it also requires that the UN and its organizations come to their senses and see how far they have strayed from their founding ideals.
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