global terrorism ON Sep 19, 2004

Putin aims veiled attack at West on global terrorism

NO TALKS: Russian President Vladimir Putin says his country will launch strikes against terrorists and that double standards threaten global security

AP , MOSCOW

President Vladimir Putin said that Russia is preparing for pre-emptive strikes against terrorists, as Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev claimed responsibility for a school hostage-taking and other terror attacks in Russia that have claimed more than 430 lives.

Speaking to a meeting of world mayors in Moscow on Friday, Putin also made a veiled attack on the West, saying that double standards in dealing with terrorism are "disastrous for global security."

Putin didn't name specific countries, but his comments appeared to be aimed against European and US officials who have urged Moscow to conduct peace talks with Chechen rebels.

"There continue to be attempts to divide terrorists into `ours and others,' into `moderates and radicals,'" Putin said in televised remarks. "All this is a condescending, justifying attitude to murders, which amounts to being an accomplice to terrorism."

Putin firmly ruled out any "bargaining" with terrorists. "Every concession leads to aggression, a widening of their demands and multiplies the losses," Putin said.

He said that "now in Russia, we are seriously preparing to act preventively against terrorists," adding that such action would be "in strict accordance with the law and norms of the constitution, norms of international law."

Putin didn't elaborate, and it wasn't immediately clear whether he was referring to action against terrorists only at home or abroad as well. Lower-level officials, including Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, have said that Russia could conduct pre-emptive strikes against terrorists abroad, saying such action could involve any weapons except nuclear.

Putin's statement came as the main Chechen rebel Web site, Kavkaz-Center, posted what it said was an e-mail from Basayev, saying that his "Riyadus Salikhin Martyrs' Brigade" was responsible for the near-simultaneous bombings of two passenger jets last month, a suicide bombing outside a Moscow subway station and the school hostage-taking in Beslan that ended in a hail of gunfire.

More than 430 people were killed in the attacks, with some 338 of those deaths coming during the seizure of the school.

The lengthy e-mail, signed with Basayev's nom de guerre, Abdallakh Shamil, defended the attacks as part of the Chechen war for independence against Russia. At the same time, Basayev sought to shift blame for the bloodshed at the school, saying the deaths were caused by a Russian attempt to storm the school.

Putin and other officials said repeatedly that they had not planned to storm the school, where the attackers had rigged bombs surrounding the approximately 1,200 hostages. According to Russian officials and witnesses, after explosions rocked the school and armed volunteers started shooting, the special forces opened fire, too.

Basayev's e-mail disputed that. and alleged that Emergency Situations Ministry workers who entered the school to purportedly collect bodies of hostages who had been killed early in the crisis were in fact security officers, and that the explosions rang out only after those workers had yelled "Run out!" to the hostages.

Car bomb defused

Meanwhile, Russian security officials said police stopped a man driving a car wired with land mines and explosives in downtown Moscow early yesterday.

A duty officer at the Federal Security Service said the man was stopped by Moscow police around 1am. Police questioned him and found two land mines in the car, along with 200 grams of TNT under the driver's seat. The mines were connected with wires and had an antenna attached to them.

The man, who appeared to be intoxicated, told police he had been paid US$1,000 to park two cars with explosives in them along a Moscow street frequently used by top government officials, said the duty officer, who refused to give his name.

The ITAR-Tass news agency identified the man as 38-year-old Alexander Pumane.

Police later located a second car in a residential neighborhood in central Moscow and used a water cannon to open it. No explosives were found but residents of nearby buildings were evacuated as a precaution, the officer said.

The duty officer confirmed that the man later suffered a heart attack and died while in police custody, but the officer refused to elaborate.

Japanese invasion remembered

NATIONALISM: The government allowed a brief protest to take place outside the Japanese embassy as flag-waving Chinese marked the 1931 invasion

AP , BEIJING

China allowed a brief protest outside the Japanese Embassy and planned to sound sirens in more than 100 cities yesterday as it commemorated the start of Japan's 1931 invasion amid official unease at Tokyo's new diplomatic and military ambitions.

The official commemorations were the biggest to date and come at a time of rising anti-Japanese sentiment, stoked by a communist government that regards Japan as its rival for regional superpower status.

In Beijing, police let 20 protesters gather outside the Japanese Embassy. They held banners opposing Tokyo's bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and its claim to a disputed island chain.

"The Chinese people who have suffered the wounds of Japanese militarism must strain every nerve to be vigilant," one protester, Zhang Jianyong, said through a loudspeaker.

The demonstrators marched away after a few minutes waving Chinese flags and singing the national anthem. Zhang sounded a hand-cranked siren at 9:18am -- representing the Sept. 18 date of the 1931 invasion -- but it was quickly confiscated by police.

Cities throughout China also planned to sound air-raid sirens and hold public ceremonies.

The attack on the northeastern city of Shenyang, then known as Mukden, led to Japan's occupation of China's northeast. That was followed in 1937 by the occupation of much of China that lasted until Tokyo's 1945 surrender at the end of World War II.

Many Chinese resent what they regard as Japan's failure to atone for its aggression and millions of Chinese deaths.

The communist government keeps memories of the "Mukden Incident" alive through state media and schoolbooks and uses the date to rally nationalism. It was designated "National Defense Education Day" four years ago.

State media called on those attending formal commemorations yesterday to chant, "Do not forget national humiliation."

In Shenyang, several thousand people were expected to attend an hour-long memorial service at the city's monument to the invasion, according to the local government.

In Beijing, state television said several hundred students took part in a flag-raising ceremony at the elite Tsinghua University -- the alma mater of President Hu Jintao.

Chinese nationalism, especially among the young, has surged along with the country's economy and international influence.

For its part, the government has been alarmed at Tokyo's recent campaign for a bigger presence on the world stage, even though Japan is China's biggest trading partner and aid donor.

China, which aspires to be Asia's dominant force, worries about Japan's recent willingness to end a decades-old ban on military activity abroad by sending troops on UN missions and to Iraq -- the first to a combat zone in the post-war era.

China is also concerned that if Japan secures a seat on the UN Security Council, it could undercut Beijing's influence as the only Asian government among the current five permanent members.

Last year, widespread public anger was sparked by reports that several hundred Japanese tourists gathered for a three-day-long sex party with prostitutes at a hotel in southern China. The Chinese organizers received unusually heavy penalties of up to life in prison.

And during the recent Asian Cup soccer tournament in China, fans booed during the Japanese national anthem, displayed anti-Japanese signs and attacked the team's bus.

Three hundred petitioners rounded up in Beijing

AFP , BEIJING
 

Police rounded up more than 300 people from a squatter area in southern Beijing where petitioners from all over China have been staying as a key Communist Party meeting convened for a third day yesterday, witnesses said.

Police raided the so-called "petition village" at about 4am, hacking down doors and smashing windows, one witness told reporters.

Many of those gathered at the village are trying to bring their grievances to national leaders engaged in the four-day meeting.

Some 198 top party officials are meeting with hundreds of "leading cadres" in closed-door talks at the fourth plenum of the Communist Party's Central Committee.

"They went round all the houses to arrest people and then they loaded them into three buses," the petitioner said. "The buses were absolutely packed."

The woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she narrowly escaped arrest by hiding under her bed. Others ran out of the houses in their pajamas.

"We're only fighting for justice, why are they treating us like criminals?" she asked.

"One of these days I'll be arrested too, since I can't hide under the bed every night."

Many other protesters were picked up by police on their way to Tiananmen Square, where they had planned to hold a 10,000-person demonstration to protest the government's refusal to handle their complaints.

One of the protest organizers, Ye Guozhu, was arrested on Aug. 27 after filing an application to hold the rally.

Other organizers, who have been under constant surveillance, were barred from leaving their homes yesterday by police officers. Ni Yulan told reporters that she was dragged back into her home when as she tried to leave for the protest.

"They threatened to take me to the police station and detain me," Ni said.

Beijing's Public Security Bureau refused to comment yesterday.

Petitioners from all over China -- many of whom have suffered injustice at the hands of corrupt officials -- have traditionally headed to Beijing before major national events to try and make their voices heard.

One rights group has estimated that about 36,000 petitioners who came to Beijing to air their grievances ahead of the plenum have been detained.

Petitioners who spoke to reporters earlier said the frequency of the arrests and the level of brutality in detention was unprecedented this year.

When commenting on the plenum meeting, state media said the party must be more accountable to the people, strengthen the rule of law and pay more attention to public welfare to strengthen its governance.

Learning from Peng's declaration

By the Liberty Times editorial

Forty years ago, Peng Ming-min, now senior advisor to the president, drafted A Declaration of Formosan Self-salvation with his students Hsieh Tsung-min and Wei Ting-chao. The opening lines of the declaration said: "A strong movement is rapidly sweeping across Taiwan. It is a self-salvation movement for the 12 million [the population at that time] people of Taiwan, who are unwilling to be governed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or destroyed by Chiang Kai-shek."

Peng and his allies were secretly arrested before the document was made public. Most people first read it (in summarized form) in Peng's memoir, A Taste of Freedom, which he wrote during his exile. Despite this, the significance and influence of the declaration was not in the least diminished. Reading it today, it still shows penetrating insights.

The declaration pointed out eight main issues, among which are: the fact of one China and one Taiwan has to be legally recognized; it is impossible to retake the mainland; attempts to retake the mainland only serve as an excuse to perpetuate the KMT regime and the KMT government represents neither China nor Taiwan.

The declaration also set three basic objectives: to establish a new state with a new government, create a new constitution and join the UN as a new member. After 40 years, some of the assertions, which were unacceptable to the alien ruler, have become shared beliefs of the Taiwanese people and guidelines that we continue to strive toward. From this, we can see how farsighted and high-aiming the declaration was.

Before drafting it, Peng, at the time director of the Department of Political Science at National Taiwan University, had been appointed consultant to the UN delegation. The political reality at the UN strengthened Peng in his conviction that there is one China and one Taiwan. The KMT government had been worried about its UN representation since 1950.

The Chiang administration claimed to be the only legitimate government in China while more and more countries accepted the effective rule of China by the People's Republic of China (PRC). That was why a draft resolution was proposed at the UN to replace the Republic of China with the PRC. Even the US, which had been a strong supporter of the KMT government, was preparing to set up official diplomatic ties with the PRC.

It is worth noting that although the US normalized relations with Beijing, it also proposed a compromise resolution to include both the PRC and ROC in the UN. In Washington's view, the ROC could become an ordinary UN member while the PRC took its seat in the Security Council. US delegates at the time officially stated that the US supported the PRC's becoming a UN member and a permanent member of the Security Council, while opposing the expulsion of the ROC from the UN.

Unfortunately, the KMT government insisted there could be "no reconciliation with the bandits" and said it strongly opposed PRC entry into the UN or any proposal that implied "two Chinas" or "one China, one Taiwan." This head-in-the-sand mentality ended in the cancelation of our representation. The UN not only recognized the PRC as the sole legitimate representative of China but also made it a permanent member of the Security Council. The ROC lost the right to represent China to the PRC.

In light of the process leading to the ROC's exit from the UN, it was not very strange that the declaration was politically suppres-

sed. As the international community turned to the dual-membership solution in the UN, and the US attempted to normalize its relationship with Beijing, the KMT regime did not care about how to safeguard the sovereign status of Taiwan, but rather how to sustain its dictatorship.

This serious historic blunder resulted in Taiwan's sovereignty being constantly undermined, and has made its bid to return to the UN an extremely difficult task. President Chen Shui-bian said recently that "we will not give up and we won't become disheartened in our attempts to gain a Taiwanese presence in the international community and possess an internationally recognized identification document." Simply put, the discrimination Taiwan now endures in the international community and the containment by Beijing in every possible way is a result of the wrong-headed mentality that there can be "no reconciliation with the bandits."

Fortunately, the Declaration of Formosan Self-salvation has survived. The "one China, one Taiwan" discourse highlighted therein has become a common belief over the past 10 years, as well as a firm conviction of our leaders. Both the two-state theory and the "one country on each side of the Taiwan Strait" discourse, proposed respectively by former president Lee Teng-hui and President Chen, resonate with the spirit of the declaration.

The necessity of calling Taiwan "Taiwan" and discarding the pro-Chinese national title ROC has also gradually made its way into mainstream public opinion. Interestingly, when the ROC was driven out of the UN, the KMT government rebuked those countries which suggested a "one China and one Taiwan" formulation.

The self-salvation movement initiated under the rule of an alien power 40 years ago was likened to an unforgivable crime. Now the alien power has been overthrown by the vote of the people. Faced with Beijing's intention to annex us, our concern has transformed from passive self-salvation to active self-determination.

Self-determination means that one's life is determined by oneself. In Taiwan's case, it means that Taiwan's future should be determined by its 23 million people. It is an irrefutable fact that Taiwan is a sovereign state and thereby Taiwanese people have the right to decide their own national title and write their own constitution.

Some people who always side with Beijing's intimidations say that any move to declare sovereignty will bring war on Taiwan. These people forget that the most important thing that the Taiwanese people need in order to create their own state and safeguard it is to cement national will.

As long as we have a strong, unwavering national will, the international community will naturally respect us, and other factors will become secondary.

In contrast, a lack of national will or a confused national identity will jeopardize the country's existence and create problems for it in the international community.

Therefore, we should adopt the perspective of self-determination when interpreting the Declaration of Formosan Self-salvation and absorb from it the drive to push history forward.

Chen changes tack on UN strategy

By Liu Kuan-teh

In an attempt to redirect Taiwan's annual campaign to rejoin the UN, President Chen Shui-bian unveiled the government's new strategy.

Through a video conference with the international media in New York, Chen sent out a clear message about the Taiwan government's strong will and ability to become a UN member.

For over a decade, the government has launched a series of campaigns to raise the question of a "return" to the UN under the ROC name, but these attempts received 11 straight rejections by the General Assembly. Although Taiwan's bid was again defeated this year, the Chen administration has injected new and decisive force into the nation's UN strategy.

By clarifying that Resolution 2758 of the General Assembly -- passed in October 1971 -- only deals with the People's Republic of China's (PRC) right to representation in the UN and its subsidiary organizations, Chen de-linked the PRC's UN representation with Taiwan's own pursuit for UN membership and its subsidiary organizations. As Chen pointed out, "Taiwan is Taiwan. Taiwan cannot and will not fight for the right to represent China."

Resolution 2758 recognized the PRC as the sole and legitimate government of China and thus granted the Beijing regime the seat in the General Assembly. This resolution constitutes the greatest hurdle for the Republic of China in returning to the UN.

The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government's maneuvering on Taiwan's participation in the UN is a manifestation of its recent advocacy for a clearer identification of "Taiwan" as a country. Chen's virtual meeting with UN journalists provided an opportunity for the DPP government to intensify its efforts to educate the international community that Taiwan and China are individual countries -- and that Taiwan's participation in the UN is not the problem, but rather the solution to the "one China" dispute.

Using the name "Taiwan" to apply for new membership faces the same obstacles the old government has encountered because to become a new member of the UN, Taiwan must receive the support of at least nine of the 15 members of the Security Council, including unanimous consent from its five standing members, which includes the PRC. Moreover, a new application requires approval by a two-thirds majority vote from the members of the General Assembly.

Just because these challenges seem insurmountable does not mean Taiwan should just passively wait and see what happens. Strengthening Taiwan's bid for UN membership is the ultimate goal. The key now is to counteract Beijing's international propaganda by reinforcing international understanding that Taiwan is not a part of China, and that Taiwan will not compete with Beijing on the issue of representing China in the UN.

Moreover, the straightforward adoption of the name "Taiwan" represents a growing collective will through democratic choices that the 23 million people in Taiwan want to become active and contributing members of the world community.

Therefore, as Chen emphasized, a free and democratic country like Taiwan should not be the "missing piece" in the UN's principle of universality. Taiwan's absence in the UN has left its 23 million people without an internationally acknowledged identity and has turned them into international vagabonds, victims of political apartheid.

In sum, it is evident that any attempt to knock on the UN's door under the rubric of the "Republic of China" is a dead end. The government and people of Taiwan should build on their progress in human rights and democratic consolidation and "participate" in, rather than "rejoin" the UN.

By doing so, it will pave the way for the world to distinguish a "democratic Taiwan" from both the authoritarian China represented by the PRC and the authoritarian China represented by the former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime.

Liu Kuan-teh is a Taipei-based political commentator.

Time to take off the kid gloves

In the wake of President Chen Shui-bian's speech and question and answer session with the UN Correspondents' Association, the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) caucus in the Legislative Yuan called on Beijing to respond positively to Chen's olive branch. Only through communication can cross-strait differences be solved, they said. This might seem eminently reasonable: after all, as Gandhi said: "You cannot shake hands with a fist." But you can protect yourself with one. To what extent has Taiwan's pursuit of some kind of rapprochement with China through goodwill gesture after goodwill gesture actually weakened its position with regard to what is, when all is said and done, an enemy nation with which it is still technically at war?

Future historians will probably agree that Taiwan's greatest problem in the last two decades has been its absolute inability to come up with a rational policy to deal with China. The reason why no such policy was ever forthcoming has a lot to do with the ambivalence of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which governed for the vast majority of this period, toward Taiwan.

Much of this ambivalence was the result of the divide in the KMT between an old guard which loathed Taiwan independence as "anti-Chinese" and an affront to their dreams of a powerful China seeking its place in the world, and the Taiwan-firsters like former president and KMT chairman Lee Teng-hui. That the man leading the party espousing unification was a hardline independence supporter led to a game of pretence, compromise and confusion that has weakened Taiwan considerably.

But there has also been miscalculation. Originally, investment in China was allowed simply because it was happening anyway and nobody had the nerve to start prosecuting businessmen for investing there. Once China had tasted the fruits of this investment, so the thinking went, it would be willing to make concessions for such things as direct links. Such thinking, however, was wrong.

What happened is that Taiwan's economy has become a virtual hostage to China. Lee tried to stop this rot in 1996 with his "no haste, be patient" policy. But as the economy weakened after the 2000 election, a panicky Chen actually abandoned Lee's policy, putting the concerns of a heavily China-invested business elite over national security and the electorate's economic well-being. Chen has continued to make concessions to China and has just as continuously been rebuffed in everything he has done, while Taiwan's position has weakened with each passing month.

How can this rot be stopped? Only the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) seems to be asking this question. This week it released a legislative election campaign manifesto which contained some good ideas. Plugging the drain of capital outflow to China is of course vital, as is beefing up the military. A wholesale shift in the values of the education system toward the promotion of Taiwanese consciousness is also needed.

But what really impresses is that while everyone complains about Taiwan being bullied, the TSU has given thought to what to do about it. The suggestion that all Chinese visiting Taiwan should have to take an oath recognizing that Taiwan is not part of China is exactly the kind of niggling irritant that is needed to show that two can play China's game.

It is not that Taiwan wants to promote conflict. It is quite willing to work with Beijing if Beijing is reasonable. But when Beijing shows no signs of changing its attitude, it is perhaps time to replace the kid gloves and the outstretched hand with a mailed fist.