Kinmen County Commissioner Lee Chu-feng (
Tatan and Erhtan are two military-control islets of Kinmen County lying 3km from China's southern coast.
"To speed up the process of troop withdrawal from these two military outposts would be a substantive move that shows the government is making overtures for cross-strait peace and thus would demonstrate the president is following through on the pledges he made last May while visiting Kinmen," said Lienchiang County Commissioner Chen Hsueh-sheng (陳雪生), who delivered the message to President Chen on behalf of Lee.
Chen Hsueh-sheng, of the PFP, met with the president yesterday morning, at a gathering of non-DPP city mayors and county commissioners to discuss major grassroots infrastructure construction projects.
Lee, despite having accepted Chen Shui-bian's invitation, was unable to make it to Taipei yesterday due to fog which has closed down the Kinmen airport for the past three days.
According to Lee, who later talked to the Taipei Times in a phone interview, the government had agreed in 2000 to withdraw troops from the two islets and to open them to tourism.
"Yet it has been almost three years now and the whole deal is still undergoing administrative procedures with the Ministry of Defense and the Kinmen county government in the process of discussing technical details," said Lee who asked Chen Hsueh-sheng to convey his concerns to the president in person yesterday.
During an inspection tour last May of Tatan, Chen Shui-bian extended an olive branch to Chinese leaders, saying that he would like to invite China's communist rul;ers to visit Tatan and have a chat and some tea with them.
The president then described Taiwan and China as neighbors and said that each side "should be able to invite each other to visit their homes and enjoy tea."
The president also said "the normalization of the cross-strait relationship is the basis for permanent peace across the Taiwan Strait," and that "both sides must reopen the door for negotiations to reduce misunderstanding and misjudgment."
Aside from making overtures for peace to the other side of the Strait, Lee said the troop pullout would allow Kinmen to emerge from "the shadows of war," as it turns the former battleground into a tourist spot.
"To the best of my knowledge, China has deployed no ground troops along its southern coast facing Taiwan," Lee said. "So troops on these two islets of Taiwan should be withdrawn soon as well as show the government's good-will gesture for peace."
Lee however failed to note that despite the absence of Chinese ground troops, China is still Taiwan's biggest security threat with its deployment of more than 400 missiles along its coast aimed at Taiwan.
According to Lee, there are altogether no more than 400 soldiers currently stationed on the two islets.
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