Nauru, a tiny South Pacific island which restored its diplomatic ties with Taiwan last year after switching recognition to China four years ago, chose to embrace Taiwan again after learning the "natural fact" that China regularly defaulted on its promises of aid, Nauruan President Ludwig Scotty said yesterday.
Scotty, who is in Taiwan for a six-day state visit, told the Taipei Times in an interview that when his government took power in 2003, it discovered that the country was nearly penniless because the billions of dollars in investment contracts from China had never materialized.
"We were kept in the dark during the time of the former [Rene] Harris government [when it established ties with Beijing]. We've been hearing about contracts worth billions of dollars being signed. But the natural fact is that we haven't seen anything," Scotty said.
Nauru broke off diplomatic ties with Taiwan in July 2002 under former president Rene Harris who unilaterally made the decision to build ties with Beijing, without the parliament's support. Scotty restored ties with Taiwan in May last year and has been working on reform programs to try to get his bankrupt government out of the red.
world's smallest
Nauru is the world's smallest independent republic. It comprises an area of 21km2 and has a population of about 13,000.
The Nauruan president, a staunch supporter of Taiwan, said he regretted that his corrupt predecessor had broken the long-term friendship between Nauru and Taiwan, which was one of the supporters of Nauru's independence achieved in 1968.
Taiwan established diplomatic relations with Nauru in 1983. The island nation was one of the world's top-three exporters of phosphates and achieved decades of economic prosperity until its reserves were exhausted.
A Ministry of Foreign Affairs official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that "initially, Nauru was not a country that wanted to build relations with Taiwan in order to ask for favors. There was once a time, during the heyday of its economic prosperity, when Nauru's GDP exceeded Taiwan's."
Air Nauru, the country's only airline, provided direct flights to Taiwan at that time, despite the fact that they were not profitable.
"Nauru is not a fair-weather friend. During the Sept. 21, 1999 earthquake, Nauru initiated a fund-raising campaign called the `Plum Flower Drive' [named after the national flower of Taiwan] to assist in our recovery from the disaster," the official said.
aid
The official also said that the aid Taiwan provided to Nauru was well within the government's capability. Aid requests from the Nauruan government were not "greedy and rude" compared to requests from the nation's other diplomatic allies -- most of which are poor states in Central America, Africa and the Pacific -- ?he said.
Scotty yesterday reiterated his sincerity in maintaining ties with Taiwan and expressed gratitude for the government's recent efforts to help return Nauru's only airplane, which had been seized as a result of wages owed to foreign laborers from Kirabati and Tuvalu.
"Over 30 years of friendship with Taiwan is not a thing to be given away like that by a corrupt government," Scotty said.
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