Thousands of Muslims, many of whom are workers from Indonesia, yesterday gathered at Taipei Railway Station for Eid al-Fitr, a celebration that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
At 8am, Muslims began filling the lobby of the station, a favorite gathering spot for Southeast Asians in northern Taiwan at weekends.
By 10am, about 15,000 visitors visitors had arrived, with a further 30,000 coming into the station to escape the rain at noon, far surpassing the station’s capacity of 5,000 people, Taipei Railway Station Master Huang Jung-hua (黃榮華) said.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
“Eid al-Fitr is very important to Muslims, much like Lunar New Year is to us. While we sincerely apologize to passengers for any inconvenience that might have been caused by the unusually high number of visitors to the station today, we also hope that passengers will respect the cultures of different peoples,” he said.
Huang said that since the station was renovated four years ago to include a large central courtyard, Muslim migrant workers have increasingly begun to adopt it as a gathering place during Eid al-Fitr.
“Taipei Railway Station respects this use of the station and hopes all passengers can see the gathering from a positive and friendly perspective. After all, this is a once-in-a-year celebration for these people,” Huang said. “We appreciate the patience of passengers despite the inconvenience they might experience today [Sunday].”
According to Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) officials, in addition to regular staff, 60 employees from the TRA, the Taipei locomotive depot, the Association for the Integration of Migrant Workers and the Taipei Grand Mosque Society, as well as an additional five cleaning staff members, were assigned to ensure the safe and normal operation of the station.
Police officers have also been brought in to assist railway police in maintaining public safety in the area of the station, the officials added.
The arrangements made by the TRA to offer Muslims a space at Taipei Railway Station for the celebration was a positive move, said Agusdin Subiantoro, deputy director of Indonesia’s National Agency for the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers, in Jakarta.
However, he said he hoped that venues could be set up in Taiwan specifically for Indonesian workers to congregate for religious events.
Meanwhile, the Taipei City government also held a one-day event at Expo Park for Indonesian and other Muslims to celebrate Eid al-Fitr. The celebrations included performances by Indonesian singer Siti Badriah and several bands, including Real Play, Marya Isma and the Reggae Rasta Kurawa Band.
Additional reporting by CNA
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: