Aboriginal rights campaigner Panai Kusui and other advocates yesterday relocated dozens of potted lilies from their protest site at the 228 Peace Memorial Park to an art museum as the Taipei City Government prepares to demolish their camp next week.
After the government announced the Guidelines for Demarcating Aboriginal Land or Tribal Areas (原住民族土地或部落範圍土地劃設辦法) in February 2017, Panai and other advocates camped on Ketagalan Boulevard, in front of the Presidential Office Building, in protest and were later forced to move to the nearby park.
The guidelines restrict Aboriginal domains to government-owned plots and exclude areas owned by private landowners, enabling businesses to launch controversial development projects on Aboriginal land, such as the Miramar Resort Hotel (美麗灣渡假村) project, advocate Liao Hsing-yu (廖幸渝) said yesterday.
Photo: Chen Yi-kuan, Taipei Times
Under the slogan “No one is an outsider,” the campaigners yesterday had camped in the area for 696 days, Liao said.
However, the municipality has said that it would remove their belongings on Tuesday, she said.
The government might have timed the removal to take advantage of the absence of other key campaigners, such as filmmaker Mayaw Biho and singer Nabu Husungan Istanda, who have left for other events, she added.
RELOCATION
The activists yesterday invited members of the public to help them relocate some of the nearly 300 pots of Taiwanese indigenous lily sprouts to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, where they have an exhibition area at the Taipei Biennial, which this year is titled Post-Nature — A Museum as an Ecosystem and ends on March 10.
Lilies are a sacred symbol for the Rukai people and campaigners from different Aboriginal communities have expressed the hope that they could return home by the time the plants blossom.
VITALITY
Taiwanese indigenous lilies are full of vitality and people who care for them should not rush to weed their pots, Panai said, before transporting some of the lilies by MRT along with nearly 20 participants.
The Democratic Progressive Party government has defended Taiwanese dignity in the face of Chinese pressure, yet it is insensitive toward the pain of Aborigines, who were deprived of their ancestral lands, languages and cultures, she said in a previous TV interview.
She added that she would continue to fight for Aborigines’ rights and raise public awareness about their predicament.
China’s Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong has asked foreign consulates in Hong Kong to submit details of their local staff, which is more proof that the “one country, two systems” model no longer exists, a Taiwanese academic said. The office sent letters dated Monday last week to consulates in the territory, giving them one month to submit the information it requires. The move followed Beijing’s attempt to obtain floor plans for all properties used by foreign missions in Hong Kong last year, which raised concerns among diplomats that the information could be used for
‘ABNORMITY’: News of the military exercises on the coast of the Chinese province facing Taiwan were made public by the Ministry of National Defense on Thursday Taiwan’s military yesterday said it has detected the Chinese military initiating a round of exercises at a bay area in coastal Fujian Province, which faces Taiwan, since early yesterday morning and it has been closely monitoring the drills. The exercises being conducted at Fujian’s Dacheng Bay featured an undisclosed number of People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) warplanes, warships and ground troops, the Ministry of National Defense said in a press statement. The ministry did not disclose what kind of military exercises are being conducted there and for how long they would be happening, but it did say that it has been closely watching
Vice President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday said that Beijing was trying to “annex” Taiwan, while China said its recent series of drills near Taiwan are aimed at combating the “arrogance” of separatist forces. The Ministry of National Defense earlier this month said that it had observed dozens of Chinese fighters, drones, bombers and other aircraft, as well as warships and the Chinese aircraft carrier Shandong, operating nearby. The increased frequency of China’s military activities has raised the risk of events “getting out of hand” and sparking an accidental clash, Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng (邱國正) said last week. Asked about the spurt
Noting that researchers have found that 85 China-based blogs and accounts were spreading a conspiracy theory that a US “meteorological weapon” had caused recent fires in Hawaii, political observers in Taiwan said the nation also needs to be vigilant of Beijing employing similar disinformation campaigns against Taiwan. The untrue content concerning Hawaii was written in 15 languages and disseminated across a myriad of platforms including Facebook, YouTube and X, a report published in Gizmodo said, citing NewsGuard, an online news content ranker. The effort represented the most expansive Chinese informational operation to be uncovered by NewsGuard to date, Gizmodo said. The conspiracy theory
RSS