WHA fails to discuss Taiwan’s application
　

NOT TALKING: Prospects looked bleak yesterday that Taiwan’s bid to enter the world health body would succeed when the group ruled to not deliberate on the application
　

By Jenny W. Hsu
STAFF REPORTER, WITH CNA
Tuesday, May 20, 2008, Page 1

The World Health Assembly (WHA), the WHO’s highest decision-making body, yesterday noon ruled not to deliberate on new member applications during this year’s plenary session in Geneva. As the result, a conventional “two-plus-two” debate on Taiwan’s bid did not take place, dimming the chances that the nation’s 12th consecutive bid to enter the WHO would succeed.

Reacting to the change, the government said it hoped that Taiwan’s allies would have a chance to challenge the ruling in the WHA’s afternoon session, which was to convene at 2:30pm.

Meanwhile, in a letter to WHO Director-General Margaret Chan (陳馮富珍), US Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt has urged the body to grant Taiwan observer status at the WHA and increase Taiwan’s participation in WHO-related technical meetings.

Leavitt reportedly called on Chan and her staff to work with the relevant member states to “identify appropriate mechanisms for experts from Taiwan to participate in the Global Outbreak and Alert Response Network” as well as to facilitate Taiwan’s involvement in the International Health Regulations, which were enacted last June.

“The WHO-sponsored disease reporting and response efforts worldwide must be seamless, as mankind faces threats of emerging infectious diseases, including the H5N1 influenza A virus. Any gap in such efforts threatens the health and the well-being of all nations,” Leavitt wrote.

Leavitt has written other similar letters to the WHO Secretariat Office since 2004 when the US agreed to throw its weight behind Taiwan’s observer bid.

The Republic of China (ROC) was one of the founding members of health watchdog but was forced to forfeit its seat in 1972 after it left the UN.

The government has been vying to re-enter the WHO since 1997, but its bids have been repeatedly sabotaged by Beijing, which claims to have sole health jurisdiction over Taiwan.

Did all those children have to die?
　

The Chinese government says it will look into why more than 6,900 classrooms were destroyed in the Sichuan earthquake

By Jonathan Watts
THE GUARDIAN, MIANYANG, CHINA
Tuesday, May 20, 2008, Page 9

　

Before she set off on the mountain path for school last Monday, Wang Xiaorong’s nine-year-old daughter gave her mum a farewell that was even more affectionate than usual.

“She kissed me again and again,” Wang recalled. “She said she had a secret to tell me. She ran back and hugged me and then she left.”

It was an unusual show of warmth even for Liu Xinqi, who was as popular among her teachers as her classmates in Beichuan elementary school.

But she had a special relationship with her mum. Even though Mother’s Day is not a Chinese tradition, Xinqi had celebrated the occasion the previous morning by giving Wang a handmade pink star.

That gift is now buried, along with the secret that the young girl did not live long enough to reveal. Xinqi was swallowed by the mountain when Sichuan Province was hit by the earthquake. She is one of an tens of thousands of fatalities from the 7.9 magnitude quake, which Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) called the most destructive in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

“As is the case throughout the quake-hit region, uncertainty about who lived and died has added to the mental pain caused by the disaster.”

Slopes were sliced off mountains, slipping down on to villages, towns and factories in the valleys. Four million homes were buried or shaken to the ground, along with hospitals and schools — especially schools.

Bodies are still being pulled from the rubble. Astonishingly, a handful are still alive, but the main job for emergency workers, the army and morticians has been to bury the dead.

Supporting the living will be the long-term challenge for China. Many of the survivors have lost everything: families, homes and businesses. Others, like Wang, are so traumatized that they are unable to eat, drink or sleep.

Spend a day at the Mianyang municipal gymnasium and it is not difficult to understand why. This is the biggest earthquake refugee camp. It is filled with more than 10,000 homeless survivors and countless tales of tragedy, luck, horror and heroism.

The camp’s growth reflects the spread of the emergency services’ reach. Wang came in the initial wave last Tuesday, rescued by the first troops to reach her devastated home in Beichuan. Since then, it has grown larger as rescue teams pushed deeper into more remote regions.

The gymnasium is overflowing. The youngest children are kept in isolation inside so they can be protected in the event of disease. The floors of the stairways and corridors outside are strewn with blankets, sleeping bags, quilts and people. Makeshift bivouacs have been thrown up under trees. The grounds are filled with green and blue tents.

Wang takes me around. We pass countless people in visible pain. Some sob quietly by themselves, one or two howl. The injured hobble or grimace with aching wounds. Some show them off. Others turn aside because they do not want their puffy, purple, bruised faces to be photographed.

There is a gallows humor to the situation. Two middle-aged women with shockingly swollen faces are living in the gym’s former boxing ring. When they peer out from the ropes, they look like badly beaten pugilists. One middle-aged man says he is glad he has lost his appetite because he doesn’t want to go to toilets shared by thousands.

“It is disgustingly dirty. I don’t want to infect my wounds,” he said.

Like many of the camp residents, he bears fresh scars from where he was hit by falling debris.

The bigger scars of the quake may be psychological. With little to do, many residents spend hours in front of televisions watching the latest satellite images of their broken homes and the search for survivors. Most stare vacantly. Anguish is written on other faces. Even in the middle of the night, there are crowds in front of the screens because many people here cannot sleep properly. Those that do have nightmares. At 3am on Friday, a single yell by someone in their sleep prompted hundreds of people to rush out of the building, screaming in fear of another earthquake. It was several minutes before they realized it was a false alarm and filed back inside

There are no set meal times, just endless offerings of water, milk, instant noodles, porridge, mantou bread and, for children and the elderly only, eggs. Considering the crowded conditions, the camp is relatively clean and its residents reasonably calm, though there was a report on Wednesday of a protest by about 100 people unhappy about the rescue operation in their communities.

Like many people in China, the big question for many refugees was why so many children died. More than a third of the confirmed dead perished in classrooms and playgrounds that proved weaker than other buildings in withstanding the seismic force. Amid a public outcry, the government has said it would investigate why more than 6,900 classrooms were destroyed.

Wang takes a more fatalistic view of the natural disaster. The earthquake, she said, collapsed the mountains on either side of Beichuan, wrapping the town up like the meat in a dumpling. She was out at the time, doing business higher up in the hills.

“When the quake hit, the mountains started shaking and collapsing, but we immediately tried to get down to check on our homes,” she said, sitting outside a tent she shares with a dozen other former neighbors.

The paths were destroyed. After 10 hours, she was still not home. People’s Liberation Army troops took her to the Mianyang gymnasium, where she found the teacher of her daughter’s class.

“When he saw me he held my hands and cried, saying he felt guilty because he had not taken care of my daughter,” she said.

When the quake struck, he told her, all the children in the class managed to flee the building and ran into the playground, only to be engulfed by the landslide.

“He told me my daughter died without even having time to call out for her mother. It is so cruel,” Wang said.

Others in her tent had similar stories about the Beichuan middle school. Tang Hua, a burly man in a vest, lost his 16-year-old son after several heart-rending days of listening to the boy’s voice grow ever weaker from inside the building where he was trapped.

“There were no cranes. I couldn’t use my hands to get him out. I kept trying until 4 the next morning, but it was no use. My son yelled ‘I can’t hold out any more.’ I tried to tell him that we were trying to save him. He stopped shouting,” Tang said.

Others in the tent were more fortunate. Two teenage boys, Zhao Jincheng and Wang Yujiang, narrowly escaped from the school.

“I jumped out of the classroom window. But I was hit by a rock and fell down, injuring my leg,” said Jincheng, who limps when he walks. “Everyone in my class got out, but many others in my school didn’t. They were buried. Less than half survived.”

As is the case throughout the quake-hit region, uncertainty about who lived and died has added to the mental pain caused by the disaster.

Many visitors come to the camp in search of lost loved ones. They scan the list of registered names pinned up on a gymnasium door and turn away, hopeful or despondent.

Among the arrivals was a group of migrant coal miners from Shaanxi Province, who had come to look for their relatives back home in Beichuan. Another rugged visitor, Bai Yonghuan, arrived on foot. The farmer, poor even by the standards of Sichuan, where the average rural income is about US$1.25 a day, said he had spent the past week walking, first in the mountains for two days and nights and now to the refugee camp. He estimated he had covered 209km. He had found his daughter alive and was now looking for his brother.

“He was in Beichuan so there is little hope that he survived,” Bai said.

But he scrawls a message on the camp noticeboard — a wall decked with cardboard posters, each appealing for information.

Some searches are successful. The brightest moment of the day came when volunteers brought six children from a village in Anxian County to the refugee camp to look for their parents. Five minutes after their names were broadcast on the stadium loudspeaker system, the parents of a young girl, Yao Yao, rushed to the meeting area for a tearful reunion.

“I’m so happy,” the mother said. “I was at home and she was in school. So many children died without seeing their parents.”

Many are now returning to their devastated homes to look for the lost or to collect what is left of their belongings. The next morning, the first group left before dawn. Half an hour later, a dozen men and women hauled themselves on to the top of a rusty truck heading back to Beichuan. Another man, the owner of a battered old rickshaw, decided to follow, picking up two passengers on the way.

“I am going back to see my house. I want to find out if my wife and child have been dug out,” he said.

Wang said she has no intention of returning home, but not because of the danger.

“I don’t want to see it ever again. I feel that if I were to walk into the mountains, the ground would still be shaking. It is a horrible feeling. I’d rather be a beggar somewhere else than return to my home. The shadow in my heart is just too strong,” she said.

“Nobody imagined such a thing would ever happened. It’s beyond our understanding. My daughter has been dead for a few days. I still can’t believe it is true. It is just so cruel. I don’t even have a photograph of her. There is nothing of her left that could remind me of her. Really, that is just too cruel,” she said.