Dozens of Aboriginal activists from across the country yesterday demonstrated outside National Taiwan University (NTU) in Taipei, accusing the university and the government of being “thieves and bandits” who have robbed the nation’s Aborigines of their traditional lands, demanding their immediate return.
Waving banners and placards condemning the government and NTU and calling on them to respect Aborigines’ rights to traditional domains as laid out in the Aboriginal Basic Act (原住民族基本法), the protesters rallied outside the school’s main campus despite rain. The demonstrators included Bununs, Tsous, Atayals, Amis, Paiwans, Puyumas and some non-Aborigines.
The demonstration was triggered by an incident last month, when several 18-wheeler trucks were seen carrying three giant trees, estimated to be about 1,000 years old, out of NTU’s experimental forest in Nantou County’s Sitou (溪頭).
Photo: Loa Iok-sin, Taipei Times
Local Bunun people immediately tried to stop the trucks, saying that they had no right to cut down and ship trees from the traditional domains of the Bunun and Tsou without their consent.
University officials met with residents and insisted that what they did was in accordance with the Forestry Act (森林法) and therefore legal.
“NTU said that what they did was legal and legitimate because the Forestry Act allows them to do so, but they may have forgotten that they have violated the Aboriginal Basic Act, which enjoys a higher status than the Forestry Act,” local Bunun activist Saoli said.
Saoli called on the university to immediately return the three trees, negotiate with local Bununs for a comanagement mechanism, apologize to residents and to pursue those responsible for the trees’ removal.
“Most of us Aborigines are Christian, and for us, ‘you shall not steal’ as written in the Ten Commandments is an important value, so what NTU has done is totally unacceptable to us,” local Bunun elder Ademan Sunkilan said. “Does anyone find it acceptable when someone breaks into your house, steals things from your home and sells them for money?”
Long-time Aboriginal rights activist Iban Nokan, of the Atayal tribe, said he felt ashamed to be an NTU graduate because of the university’s role as an accomplice in stealing lands from Aborigines.
“Although the government designated some lands as Aboriginal reserves in the 1980s following the Aboriginal rights movement, 90 percent of Aboriginal lands are still in the hands of the government,” Iban said.
He said the Japanese colonial government considered Aboriginal lands as “no man’s land” after its occupation of Taiwan, and turned the lands into national properties “according to law.”
“After the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] regime took over Taiwan after World War II, the nation’s Aborigines were hoping that they would get their lands back, but the KMT government merely turned the ownership from the Japanese imperial government to the Republic of China government,” he said.
Iban said that instead of returning it to Aborigines, Tokyo Imperial University’s experimental forest in Sitou was taken over by NTU, that of Hokkaido Imperial University in Greater Taichung City was turned to National Chung Hsing University and former experimental forests of the Kyoto Imperial University and Kyushu Imperial University are now administered by the Forestry Bureau.
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