Chinese win win win on Aug 09, 2004

Japan spoils China's party

ASIAN CUP FINAL: While the Chinese squad failed in its first appearance at the event's final, Japan crushed the host's hopes, winning amid hostile conditions in Beijing

AP , Beijing

Keiji Tamada scored in injury time Saturday to seal a 3-1 Asian Cup final victory for defending champion Japan over host China in a tense match overshadowed by nationalistic passions among Chinese and anti-Japanese violence.

The loss was a heartbreaking ending for a much-improved China, which had downed Asian rivals such as Iran and Indonesia on its way to appearing in its first-ever final of the continent's most important soccer championship.

Ultimately, though Japan's experience showed through and its players were able to hold on for the win while China flagged.

"From beginning to end Japan showed maturity, quality and experience, and was well prepared," said Japan's Brazilian-born coach, Zico.

Sincef Japanese players and fans at previous matches were harassed, thousands of police -- including riot troops in black body armor and shotgun-toting special tactical units -- stood guard outside Beijing's Workers' Stadium.

The tournament rivalry has given vent to anti-Japanese sentiments over Japan's brutal World War II invasion that are stoked by frequent confrontational reports in Chinese state media.

Following the match, crowds chanting anti-Japanese insults broke bottles and exchanged kicks and punches with police outside the stadium. At least three men were seen being taken away by officers, but it wasn't clear if anyone was injured.

Japan opened the scoring against the run of play in the 23rd minute when Shunsuke Nakamura lofted a free kick from the left to the far post, where Takayuki Suzuki turned it back for Takashi Fukunishi, whose close-range header hit the net under the crossbar.

To the delight of the crowd, veteran striker Li Ming equalized in the 31st minute with a powerful left footer from the top of the penalty area, after Yan Song had dribbled his way through two defenders on the left side to deliver a low cross to the middle.

Japan's attack looked sharper in the second half, and Koji Nakata put Japan ahead in the 65th minute with a controversial goal off a corner kick by Nakamura. Nakata made contact after the ball had skipped off Suzuki's head and it appeared to have hit Nakata's hand.

China's best chance to equalize came in the 89th minute when Kawaguchi was forced to make a pair of excellent saves at full stretch as Chinese attackers swarmed.

The Japanese 'keeper was tested again minutes later when Xu Yunlong chased a long pass in the box, but was unable to get his shot off in time.

Tamada scored Japan's third goal in the first minute of injury time, easily slotting a low blast past Chinese keeper Liu Yunfei and silencing the crowd of 65,000 flag-waving Chinese supporters.

China's Dutch coach Ari Haan accused Kuwaiti referee Saad Al Fadhli of making wrong calls on all three goals by Japan and boycotted the awards ceremony following the match.

"I'm feeling very disappointed and feel sorry for the beautiful fans of China to lose a game one should not lose," Haan said.

Japan has only lost twice to China in their last 10 meetings and has won all four of their Asian Cup matchups. Despite the loss, China can take solace in seeing its FIFA world ranking shoot up 13 places during the tournament to 51.

Both Japan and China had appealed for calm before the game after Chinese fans booed the team in previous appearances and pelted fans with garbage. The Japanese Embassy cautioned Japanese in China not to wear their blue national team jerseys or carry firecrackers or banners with confrontational slogans to the final. The embassy building was also sealed off with barbed wire barriers.

Although the crowd booed through the Japanese national anthem -- something Japan's government and coach Zico had complained about previously -- there was less abuse inside the stadium than in Japan's previous matches. Several hundred Japan fans, many displaying Chinese as well as Japanese flags, sat in a separate section of the stadium where they were guarded by scores of police officers.

The harshest sentiment on show was a banner reading "This time, the Chinese people get to be the bullies" -- another reference to Japan's wartime record.

Former diplomats scorn Howard

`APPALLING RECORD': Arguing that Australia's prime minister rubber-stamped US foreign policies, 43 defense and diplomatic leaders say he deceived his constituents

AP , CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA

Former defense chiefs and diplomats yesterday condemned Aus-tralia's involvement in the Iraq war in what could be a major blow to Prime Minister John Howard's re-election prospects.

The 43 eminent Australians, including two former chiefs of defense and three ambassadors, issued a scathing public statement accusing the government of deceit and rubber-stamping foreign policies decided by Washington.

"We are concerned that Australia was committed to join the invasion of Iraq on the basis of false assumptions and the deception of the Australian people," the statement said. "Above all, it is wrong and dangerous for our elected representatives to mislead the Australian people."

The statement comes as some commentators predict Howard this week will call for elections to be held Sept. 18. Opinion polls predict the election will be too close to call, but have suggested the Iraq war will be a major issue with up to 75 percent of voters believing the invasion was not justified.

Howard, who hopes for a fourth three-year term as prime minister, denied the government misrep-resented intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs and had pressured spy agencies into bolstering a case for war.

"The argument that we took the country to war based on a lie is itself a misrepresentation and I continue to reject it," Howard said in Samoa where he attended a Pacific leaders' forum.

Howard had cited Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, which have never been found, as the main reason for war.

Opposition Labor Party leader Mark Latham promised honesty if elected prime minister.

"It is very, very important to ensure on those big questions in the war against terror you are honest with the Australian people and you are getting the policy right ... to make the country more secure, not less secure," he told Australian Broadcasting Corp. "Mr. Howard has an appalling record."

Labor has also suggested that Australia's involvement in Iraq has raised its profile as a terrorist target. The government rejects the allegation.

Howard's decision to commit 2,000 troops to the Iraq invasion sparked the biggest peace protests in Australia since the Vietnam War.

Australia still has nearly 900 troops in and around Iraq, and their deployment is likely to become a key election issue, with Howard saying they must remain there as long as they are needed and Latham vowing to bring some home by Christmas if he wins power.

Bulletgate missive misses the mark

By Ming-chi Wu

Briton Sir Ernest Benn (1875-1954) once stated, "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy." Benn's words very well describe the crusade Taiwan's pan-blues have entertained since President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu were shot on March 19 while campaigning in Tainan.

Since that fateful day, the pan-blues have held that the assassination attempt was a scam, that there were irregularities in the ballot count, that huge numbers of military personnel were kept from voting, that the invalid ballot count was suspiciously high, and that therefore the March 20 presidential elections should be nullified.

A fancy pamphlet titled "Bulletgate" has been distributed throughout the US in an attempt to win hearts and minds to the pan-blue cause. Instead of the desired outcome, however, the pan-blue diatribe has people in Washington shaking their heads.

Instead of winning over the US Congress, the think tank world and the media with "Bulletgate" the pan-blue alliance is playing Russian roulette with its own credibility. Not only has the pamphlet turned out to be an inappropriate lobby ploy, it is an embarrassment for the nation that this internal political affair was brought into US politics by the pan-blues.

The day after the publication landed in US congressional offices, we at the Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA) received a copy sent to us by a Congressional office, accompanied by the comment of a staffer saying: "This is an example of how NOT to lobby."

The 2000 US presidential election was hotly contested and was finally decided by a Supreme Court vote. While many Democrats believe to this day that Al Gore should have been declared president, the whole country decided to move forward and accept the rule of law as underscored by the Supreme Court.

US politicians and policy makers understand that Chen and his Democratic Progressive Party are committed to the rule of law and have consistently refused to use the illegal, unconstitutional means that the pan-blue alliance has suggested to resolve the 2004 election disputes. Such non-constitutional means have included asking Chen to declare a state of emergency -- which to all intents and purposes means martial law -- and using the huge powers such a declaration would give him to order a recount on his own initiative rather than use the constitutionally established procedure.

The US emphasis on the rule of law has been loud and clear, and US policymakers have shown that they trust Chen to carry out his legal responsibilities.

On March 26, the White House released a statement congratulating Chen and the people of Taiwan on the "successful conclusion of their March 20 presidential election."

The statement continued, "We recognize that there are pending legal challenges to the results of the March 20 election. We applaud the people of Taiwan for embracing established legal mechanisms and rejecting extra-legal options to resolve their differences. We reject calls for violence, which threaten the very democratic principles to which we and the people of Taiwan are committed."

At an April 21 hearing on the Taiwan Relations Act, Representative Dan Burton asked a series of questions regarding the election -- about the investigation into the shooting incident and the number of military personnel who were allegedly kept from voting. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia James Kelly gave a clear response: "[Our] view is essentially, these are questions that the people and the institutions of Taiwan are more than capable of resolving for themselves. And our view is that the process is proceeding in which these questions are going to be resolved in a legitimate and appropriate way."

When Burton again asked about an investigation into the shooting, Kelly was even more forceful.

"Even assuming that the inauguration goes ahead on May 20, this coming December there's going to be elections for the Legislative Yuan, for the legislative body. This is going to provide another opportunity for the people of Taiwan to make their views known. So there is a system of checks and balances going on there," he said.

In short, move forward and stop whining.

On June 24, House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde introduced and passed resolution HCR462, the 25th Anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act. The reason Hyde waited until June to introduce and pass the resolution was because he wanted to wait until the commotion surrounding Taiwan's election was over. Obviously, Hyde, along with the rest of the US Congress, had determined that Chen would be Taiwan's president for the next four years.

Five days after the passage of the TRA resolution though, the pan-blue lobbyists were still not ready to give up. Having exhausted interest in their conspiracy theory at home in Taiwan, they decided to renew their effort to take their slanderous campaign to the other side of the Pacific. As early as April, the pan-blues had begun to publish advertisements in American newspapers such as the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Capitol Hill magazine The Hill. But when these ads seemed to fall on deaf ears, they decided to start distributing their "Bulletgate" pamphlet on Capitol Hill -- a glossy brochure full of unsubstantiated accusations.

Some in the pan-blue camp might say that they are simply lobbying for a cause on Capitol Hill, something that we at FAPA have done for over 20 years now. The crucial difference is that FAPA has always lobbied for US support for democracy for all the people of Taiwan. We have never attacked persons or political parties to score partisan points. When FAPA was established over 20 years ago, Taiwan was under martial law and under the rule of a dictatorship. So FAPA has always brought out into the open the issues of human rights and personal and political freedoms, enabling the US to help the people of Taiwan regain their voice.

By distributing their "Bulletgate" pamphlet on Capitol Hill, the pan-blues are playing partisan politics on foreign grounds. They attack the president and his party, and thus all the president's supporters. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has never refrained from hanging dirty laundry in public in a foreign country for the rest of the world to see. On Oct. 20, 2003 for instance, in a speech at a Heritage Foundation/American Enterprise Institute sponsored luncheon in Washington DC, KMT Chairman Lien Chan was notable for his rigorous criticism of Chen.

Lien fed his American audience the line that, unlike Chen, Lien himself would not be a "troublemaker," once elected and that he would be "more discreet and prudent," that he would "not add another crisis" to the security problems in East Asia.

In his speech, Lien offered not one word of criticism of the PRC. And not one word about the more than 500 Chinese missiles in Fujian Province pointed at Taiwan.

Lien's speech and the "Bulletgate" affair have sullied the KMT/PFP alliance's reputation in Washington, not that of Chen and the pan-green coalition.

Clearly, Bulletgate has missed the mark.

Ming-chi Wu is president of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs