N Korea fires five missiles and declares ‘no sail’ zone

REUTERS, SEOUL
Tuesday, Oct 13, 2009, Page 1

North Korea has fired five short-range missiles off its east coast and declared a “no sail” zone in the area until Oct. 20, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency quoted a government source as saying yesterday.

South Korean government officials were not immediately available for comment.

The latest launches, the first in about three months, come as Pyongyang said it was ready to return to international talks on its nuclear weapons program, though it has insisted on holding talks first with the US.

It was not clear whether these were routine military exercises. They coincided with local media reports that the US is planning to send its aircraft carrier USS George Washington to the South Korean port of Busan today.

The reclusive North has hundreds of short-range range missiles, with the ability to strike Seoul and its sprawling urban surroundings — home to around 25 million people.

A nuclear test in May and a spate of missile tests around the same time triggered tighter sanctions against the North, whose desperate economic straits some analysts believe are behind recent attempts improve relations with the outside world.

A UN resolution bans North Korea from launching ballistic missiles, but there are no international agreements that bar it from test-launching short-range missiles.

Civic groups denounce indictment of Wild Strawberries movement organizer
　

By Loa Iok-sin
STAFF REPORTER
Tuesday, Oct 13, 2009, Page 3

“The prosecutors [who indicted Lee] either did so because of political pressure, or because they’re living in the past, when demonstrations were considered something rebellious.”— Lin Feng-jeng, executive director of the Judicial Reform Foundation

Civic groups yesterday criticized the indictment of one of the leaders of the “Wild Strawberries” student movement for violating the Assembly and Parade Act (集會遊行法).

National Taiwan University (NTU) sociology professor Lee Ming-tsung (李明璁) was one of the leaders of the Wild Strawberries, who protested against a violent crackdown on demonstrators opposing last year’s visit by China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林). The movement has called for a revision of the act.

The law requires demonstration organizers to apply for permits for using public space from local police as well as the relevant local government, and to pay a deposit at least a week before the planned demonstration.

Both the local government and police may reject an application for a variety of reasons, including concern that the demonstration may threaten social stability.

The Wild Strawberry movement as well as many human rights activists have argued that the right to demonstrate was ensconced in the Constitution and that no permission should be required from the government.

Instead, they said, government and police authorities should help ensure that demonstrations proceed smoothly and peacefully.

However, Lee was indicted for organizing the first sit-in demonstration of the Wild Strawberry movement in front of the Executive Yuan on Nov. 6 last year ­without first obtaining permission.

“The prosecutors [who indicted Lee] either did so because of political pressure, or because they’re living in the past, when demonstrations were considered something rebellious,” Judicial Reform Foundation executive director Lin Feng-jeng (林峰正) told a news conference after Lee’s court appearance.

Lin said the charges against Lee made no sense, especially considering that nothing happened to NTU professor Tsay Ting-kuei (蔡丁貴), who organized an ongoing pro-independence sit-in around the Legislative Yuan that began in October last year without permission, and that the organizers of a campaign against former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) were found not guilty for leading thousands of people in a march through the streets of Taipei, also without applying for permission.

Huang Wei-lin (黃威霖), a graduate student at NTU’s political science department, asked if Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺), who used to be a political science professor at NTU, had changed his stance since taking a Cabinet position.

Jiang told the Central News Agency in an interview last month that there was room to liberalize the Assembly and Parade Act, but there was no need to call it an “evil law” and push to abolish it.

He was quoted as saying that he had told activists criticizing amendments to the law proposed by the Cabinet that the government would “rather not revise it at all if they keep criticizing it.”

Jiang added that demonstration organizers had to notify local police ahead of time to prevent more than one group from holding rallies at the same time at the same place, which could lead to conflict.

However, while he was still an NTU professor, Jiang wrote in an article published by the Chinese-language Apple Daily in 2006 that people should “examine whether the Assembly and Parade Act is unconstitutional” and not “obey an evil law that may be violating the Constitution.”

He also urged the government not to worry that participants in a mass demonstration would inevitably turn irrational or that demonstrations would create social instability.

Falun Gong head would ‘damage cross-strait ties’

STAFF WRITER, WITH CNA
Tuesday, Oct 13, 2009, Page 3

National Security Bureau (NSB) Director Tsai Der-sheng (蔡得勝) said yesterday that now is not an appropriate time for Li Hongzhi (李洪志), the founder of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, to visit Taiwan. Tsai cited national interest and security considerations while saying the government would not grant Li a visa if he were to apply for one.

A visit from Li would “damage cross-strait ties,” Tsai said in a Legislative Yuan committee meeting.

Falun Gong is banned in China. Beijing branded the spiritual group as an evil cult in 1999 and has since carried out a campaign to detain, re-educate and jail Falun Gong members. China has been accused of torturing, murdering and harvesting the organs of Falun Gong practitioners.

Li was born in Jilin Province and now lives in New York.

Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) queried the NSC director on the matter during the legislative National Defense Committee meeting after a local newspaper reported last week that the DPP planned to invite Li to visit Taiwan. The party previously invited the Dalai Lama, who visited the island in late August to console Typhoon Morakot victims.

The DPP dismissed the report.

Asked whether the government was treating Falun Gong as an evil cult, director Tsai said it wasn’t.

Tsai Der-sheng also told legislators yesterday that during the 15 months since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took office, phone monitoring had decreased and that he would step down if the government’s wiretapping were proven illegal.

The director said that wiretapping for intelligence reasons had dropped 65.46 percent, while wiretapping in criminal investigations had decreased 56.99 percent.

Many legislators expressed skepticism, with some saying their phone calls had been monitored by the authorities.

Tsai Der-sheng’s comments followed a newspaper report last month that quoted an anonymous source at the monitoring unit of an intelligence agency as saying that wiretapping conducted by intelligence agencies had increased over the past year. Ma promised during his election campaign that there would be no more illegal wiretapping if he was elected, and reiterated his determination to end the practice of illegal eavesdropping during his inaugural speech.

Meanwhile, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇) yesterday asked the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau to probe former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) comments about being an “agent” for the US government to determine whether Chen could be charged with treason.

Wu was referring to a comment by Roger Lin (林志昇), a member of the Taiwan Civil Rights Litigation Organization. Lin said Chen had declared himself an “agent” of the US government during his eight-year presidency and said the Republic of China government was in exile because the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty left Taiwan under the jurisdiction of the US military government. At the committee meeting, Investigation Bureau Director-胃eneral Wu Ying (吳瑛) agreed to form a task force to probe the “agent” claim for any violations of the law.

As the economy grows, so do China’s garbage woes

AP , ZHANGLIDONG, CHINA
Tuesday, Oct 13, 2009, Page 5

Visitors can smell the village of Zhanglidong long before they see it.

More than 100 dump trucks piled high with garbage line the narrow road leading to the village, waiting to empty their loads in a landfill as big as 20 football fields.

In less than five years, the Zhengzhou Comprehensive Waste Treatment Landfill has overwhelmed this otherwise pristine village of about 1,000 people. Peaches and cherries rot on trees, infested with insect life drawn by the smell. Fields lie unharvested, contaminated by toxic muck. Every day, another 91 or so tonnes of garbage arrive from nearby Zhengzhou, a provincial capital of 8 million.

“Life here went from heaven to hell in an instant,” says lifelong resident Wang Xiuhua, swatting away clouds of mosquitoes and flies.

The 78-year-old woman suddenly coughs uncontrollably and says the landfill gases inflame her bronchitis.

As more Chinese ride the nation’s economic boom, a torrent of garbage is one result. Cities are bursting at the seams, and their officials struggle to cope.

The amount of paper, plastic and other garbage has more than tripled in two decades to about 272 million tonnes a year, said Nie Yongfeng (聶永豐), a waste management expert at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

Americans are still way ahead of China in garbage; a population less than a quarter the size of China’s 1.3 billion generated 230 million tonnes of garbage in 2007, a third of which is recycled or composted, the US Environmental Protection Agency says.

But for China, the problem represents a rapid turnabout from a generation ago, when families, then largely rural and poor, used and reused everything.

“Trash was never complicated before, because we didn’t have supermarkets, we didn’t have fancy packaging and endless things to buy,” Nie said. “Now suddenly, the government is panicking about the mountains of garbage piling up with no place to put it all.”

In Zhanglidong, villagers engage in shouting matches with drivers and sometimes try to bodily block their garbage trucks coming from Zhengzhou, 32km away.

A few families live within 100m of the landfill, separated from it by a fence. These families get 100 yuan (US$15) a month in government compensation.

The dump has poisoned not just the air and ground, but relationships. Villagers say they were never consulted, and suspect their Chinese Communist Party officials were paid to accept the landfill. The villagers say not only were their petitions ignored, but they were warned by the Zhengzhou police to stop protesting or face punishment.

“We villagers were too naive ... we didn’t know what a landfill was,” Li said. “If we had known earlier about all the pollution it would cause, we would had done everything possible to stop the construction process. Now it’s too late.”

Elsewhere, thousands of farmers in Hubei Province clashed with police last year over illegal dumping near their homes. A person filming the clash died after being beaten by police.

Protests in cities are driving trash to the countryside.

Residents in central Beijing swarmed the offices of the Ministry of Environment last year, protesting the stench from a landfill and plans for a new incinerator there. In July, officials scrapped the incinerator plan and closed the landfill four years early.

In eastern Beijing, local officials invested millions of dollars to make the Gao An Tun landfill and incinerator one of a handful in China to meet global health standards. That was after 200,000 residents petitioned for a year about the smell.

“Our standard of living is improving, so it’s natural that more and more of us begin to fight for a better quality of life,” said Zhang Jianhua, 67, one of the petitioners.

“Widespread media coverage embarrassed the local government, so they finally decided to take action,” she said.

After millennia as a farming society, China expects to be majority urban in five years.

Busy families are shifting from fresh to packaged foods, consumption of which rose 10.8 percent a year from 2000 to last year, well above the 4.2 percent average in Asia, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council said. By 2013, the packaged-food market is expected to reach US$195 billion, up 74 percent from last year.

At least 85 percent of China’s 6.3 billion tonnes of trash is in landfills, much of it in unlicensed dumps in the countryside. Most have only thin linings of plastic or fiberglass. Rain drips heavy metals, ammonia and bacteria into the groundwater and soil, and the decomposing stew sends out methane and carbon dioxide.

“If the government doesn’t step up efforts to solve our garbage woes, China will likely face an impending health crisis in the coming decade,” warns Liu Yangsheng (劉陽生), an expert in waste management at Peking University.

Gaza’s ‘zebras’: symbols of life under blockade

AFP , GAZA CITY
Tuesday, Oct 13, 2009, Page 6
　

At Happy Land Zoo in Gaza, two donkeys earned their stripes and became zebras.

The two made-in-Gaza zebras have become symbols of life under the Israeli blockade, a local attraction and a bit of a joke.

“The zebras are locally manufactured,” said zoo director Mahmud Barghut, grinning from ear to ear. “We take a donkey and draw stripes on it.”

The operation takes two days and entails the use of sticky tape and French-made hair coloring, which Barghut said worked best for this kind of job.

The two imposters stare at visitors with sad eyes from a tiny, fly-ridden cage.

“We couldn’t afford real zebras,” Barghut said.

Since the Islamist Hamas movement seized power in the Gaza Strip in 2007, the Palestinian enclave has been under a blockade, with Israel and Egypt only allowing in humanitarian and basic supplies.

Hundreds of smuggling tunnels have since been built under the border with Egypt, to bring in anything from weapons to cars, petrol and toys, but the tunnel imports can be costly and Israel drives up the prices by regularly bombing the smuggling tunnels.
　

The zoo’s lion and two ostriches were brought in through the tunnels when they were babies, but a zebra would be prohibitive.

“It would have cost us US$30,000,” Barghut said.

A donkey — a ubiquitous feature of Gaza’s streets — can be had for just US$700.

Smuggling wildlife into Gaza came to international attention in March 2007 when EU officials who were monitoring the Rafah border crossing with Egypt at the time caught a Palestinian woman trying to sneak in three live crocodiles.

The toothy reptiles, each about 40cm long, were taped to the woman beneath a loose fitting robe.

The woman, who came under suspicion for appearing inordinately fat, told border guards she intended to sell the crocodiles to a Gaza zoo.

In a sealed-off, overcrowded territory of 1.5 million people that has little in the way of entertainment, the zoo on the outskirts of Gaza City is highly popular.

“There’s nothing but the zoo or the beach,” Barghut said.

Visitors from outside, however, may well find “Happy Land” a sad place.

Other than the would-be zebras, the lion and two ostriches, there’s only a camel and some birds.

Their cages are tiny and their food is strictly rationed. The lion gets 10kg of meat per day, about half of what Barghut said is the recommended amount.

The animals are often sick and the medicine they need is unavailable in Gaza.

“If there was an animal protection group here, they would have us all arrested for mistreating the animals,” Barghut said. “I tell myself that it’s a sin not to take care of them properly, but I try to do my best.”

There used to be other animals, including a leopard and monkeys, but they were killed during Israel’s devastating military offensive at the turn of the year.

“Most died of thirst or hunger. For three weeks, we couldn’t approach the zoo. An [Israeli] tank was posted by the entrance,” Barghut said. “I called emergency services, but they told me they weren’t even able to help people.”

About 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the 22-day offensive.

Barghut said he loves the little zoo he built just over a year ago but, after pumping all his funds into it, he’s now broke and putting the animal park up for sale.

“I have no more money to maintain it,” he said.

The zoo isn’t exactly a cash cow.

Most Gazans have little money and Barghut has to keep the entrance fee affordable — the equivalent of US$0.30 per child.

“The zoo is meant for children. When they come here, they are happy, they run, they have fun. They want to see the lion and the zebra — they believe they are real,” Barghut said.

Four-year-old Yara al-Masri, however, wasn’t fooled.

“I know it’s not a real zebra, but it’s a pretty donkey,” she said, laughing.

Punishing the ‘bad’ Taiwanese

Tuesday, Oct 13, 2009, Page 8

The National Immigration Agency (NIA) and the Tourism Bureau announced on the weekend that 9,500 employees of the Beijing-based Pro-Health Company and their family members would come to Taiwan on a sightseeing tour late this month, adding that the south would not be part of the itinerary.

This time, the claim that visits by or documentaries about individuals (such as Uighur rights activist Rebiya Kadeer) who are loathed by Beijing was behind the decision to spurn the south cannot be sustained, even if no reason has been given for the decision.

What Beijing — and by extension the Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration — is doing is fairly transparent, however: It is using Chinese tourists as an economic weapon to punish and sideline a segment of the country that is perceived as a bastion of Taiwanese independence and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) support.

In response, Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) is said to have begun looking into alternative sources of tourists by focusing on Japanese and Europeans, among others.

Whether this new gambit by China and its tourism proxies succeed in hurting the south economically remains to be seen and will be contingent on Chen and others being able to mitigate the effects. What will happen, however, is a further political fragmenting of the country along a north-south axis. It is not hard to imagine that after tourism, Chinese institutional investment in Taiwan, which the Ma administration is now allowing in a growing number of sectors, could also be used as a means to isolate the south and widen the wealth gap between the two parts of the country.

If such a strategy were successful, the south could eventually face a disadvantage vis-a-vis other parts of Taiwan and the region. In such a scenario, residents there would face a choice between economic opportunity or discrimination, compelling them to compromise their political beliefs and support for independence. One result would be the possible sidelining of the DPP, as only votes for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) or other pro-unification parties would be perceived to hold the promise of Chinese tourism and investment.

By quickly liberalizing trade with China, the Ma administration has made it possible for China to use the economy as a weapon to reward and punish. The “good” north is being rewarded, while the “bad” south is being forced into a corner to either rot or “reform.”

The political polarization of Taiwan along geographical lines would be an unhealthy development that would undermine the unity that is necessary to protect the nation against Chinese encroachment on its sovereignty.

National unity that transcends geography and political differences, as well as efforts to limit economic dependence on China, will be the best means to counter Beijing’s strategy of divide and conquer.

There will be costs in doing so, and China could “punish” tour operators or firms in the north that refuse to go along with its plan, but in the end, it would be far costlier to this nation if it allowed China to cleave Taiwan in two.

Taiwan is becoming a running dog
　

By Lin Cho-shui 林濁水
Tuesday, Oct 13, 2009, Page 8

The government said it refused to issue a visa to Uighur rights advocate Rebiya Kadeer because the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), which Kadeer heads, is connected to East Turkestan “terrorist” organizations. WUC secretary-general Dolkun Isa is even more “dangerous,” as he is allegedly on Interpol’s Red Notice list for immediate arrest. We are told that if he were allowed to enter Taiwan, national interests would be at risk as per the Immigration Act (入出國及移民法).

Opposition politicians lashed out at the government for undermining freedom of expression and movement, as well as the sovereignty issue. The most polite criticism came from Wang Dan (王丹), a dissident who left China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, when he said he could understand the refusal to issue a visa based on concerns over cross-strait relations, but not based on a connection between Kadeer and terrorism.

It is the government’s responsibility to protect the rights of the nation’s citizens. In addition, human rights are a set of universal values every democracy strives toward. In international politics, however, national interests are often given priority over human rights. Former US president Jimmy Carter has been one of the most active human rights advocates on the international arena in recent years, yet he cannot explain why, on his watch, the US abandoned Taiwan — although admittedly not a democracy at the time — in favor of China, a communist dictatorship.

Nor has the US been able to explain why, when dealing with the Dalai Lama, a universally respected religious leader, its presidents mostly meet the spiritual leader in nonofficial settings. There are constant changes and no consistency. The meeting between US President Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama, originally scheduled for this month, has now been postponed because of concerns over China’s reaction.

The Dalai Lama rejected all invitations to visit Taiwan between 2001 and last year, again over political concerns.

If both the US, the country that is capable of applying the most pressure to promote human rights in the international arena, and the Dalai Lama, who is very particular about human rights, are forced to make such tradeoffs between practical concerns and ideals, it is not surprising that Wang, who lives in exile, can only say helplessly that he understands why the Taiwanese government would refuse to issue a visa to Kadeer.

The tradeoff between human rights and national interests, however, should only be a question of more or less rather than an either-or choice, and the international community should not focus only on practical interests while ignoring human rights. Kadeer and Isa provide two good examples of how this balance can be struck. They are merely working for autonomy and not separation or independence from China, yet they have been labeled independence activists and traitors and framed as terrorists. Beijing has even requested that other countries arrest and extradite them to China and that Interpol provide assistance.

Interpol is not an institution with powers, but merely provides a platform for cooperation between police in different countries, and there are often great differences in how legislation in member countries defines crime.

This means that even if a country requests that a person be put on Interpol’s wanted list, other countries can either assist, or they can ignore the request to protect the dignity and sovereignty of their own laws because the request does not meet the requirements of their domestic legislation.

If a country determines a case to be a matter of political persecution, they can offer political asylum.

Kadeer has received a US green card while Isa has obtained German citizenship, and Isa even attended a forum organized by the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in August, the same month that Taiwan’s Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) was calling him a terrorist.

Oddly enough, Jiang insists that Isa, who is enjoying international protection at many levels, has been listed as a terrorist by Interpol. Because Interpol has not published such a list, he says he obtained the classified information from “an ally.”

This sounds odd. Arrest orders for major dangerous criminals are published everywhere to facilitate their arrest. What would be the use of a secret list, one that only allies of the Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration know about? Unless, of course, it is a matter of persecution.

Without missing a beat, Jiang shamelessly claimed that Beijing’s arrest order was internationally recognized by Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. This is not a pretty list. It is a list of Chinese allies with bad human rights records. It is a rare occasion to see the Taiwanese government turn its back on liberty on a human rights issue and instead place itself on the side of authoritarian states. Jiang should tell us which of those countries are our allies.

The Ma administration’s explanations are a series of lies. These lies have undermined human rights, the spirit of freedom, the rule by law and the sovereignty of Taiwan. Taiwan is about to become the running dog of China’s anti-human rights camp.

Lin Cho-shui is a former Democratic Progressive Party legislator.

US position on Taiwan defense is shifting
　

By Lin Cheng-Yi 林正義
Tuesday, Oct 13, 2009, Page 8

Former US president George W. Bush planned to station missile interceptors in Poland and radar bases in the Czech Republic to prevent Iran from attacking Europe with missiles. However, because the plan upset Russia, US President Barack Obama canceled it. A Wall Street Journal editorial criticized Obama for giving dictators more room to maneuver while not giving those who challenge dictators enough opportunities.

Obama’s tendency to please enemy states while overlooking allies and the way he has dealt with Poland and Tibet make one wonder whether he might postpone the sale of F16C/D fighter planes to Taiwan because of Chinese opposition. This is something that Taiwan cannot afford to ignore.

Obama administration officials have repeatedly said the US has the responsibility to provide defensive weapons to Taiwan according to the Taiwan Relations Act. However, he has also extended strategic guarantees to Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤). While the Obama administration slapped 35 percent tariffs on Chinese tires and sent the USS Chung-Hoon destroyer to protect the US’ naval right of passage in the South China Sea, his postponing of a meeting the Dalai Lama, muted criticism of China’s human rights and finance policies and increasing China’s voting power in the IMF all show that moral principles are losing to practical concerns.

Over the past two years, Taiwan has set funds aside and requested that the US provide it with weapons. At the 2009 US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference, Deputy Minister of National Defense Chao Shih-chang (趙世璋) said budgets and policy implementation in the coming years would be hindered because major procurement deals such as those for F-16C/D fighters cannot be completed in time. In the past, it was Taiwan that delayed arms purchases; now it is the US government, and in doing so it is allowing the cross-strait military balance to shift in Beijing’s favor.

Obama will find that the longer he postpones the sale of the F16C/Ds to Taiwan, the stronger China’s reaction and the higher the price the US and Taiwan will have to pay to pacify it.

After the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996, then-US president Bill Clinton realized that there were not enough military exchanges between the US and Taiwan, that neither side understood the other enough and that this highlighted serious security issues. Under the leadership of Kurt Campbell, then deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asia and the Pacific, the US and Taiwan increased collaboration on issues aside from arms purchases, including exchanges on strategic ideas, crisis scenarios and system integration. Campbell is now assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. In the past, he was also a member of the Center for a New American Security, a ­Washington-based think tank, as is US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs Wallace Gregson.

This implies that the Obama administration plans to increase the “soft power” of Taiwan’s military and will not be focusing so much on weapons sales.

At the conference, Gregson said that as Taiwan’s national defense resources are limited, Taiwan should adopt more creative security concepts.

He also suggested that Taiwan develop asymmetric warfare capabilities. This suggestion is very similar to the “porcupine” defense strategy proposed by US Naval War College professor William Murray and probably shows the way for future US-Taiwan cooperation on defense. The method dodges the matter of selling F16C/Ds to Taiwan and eases US worries that US-made weapons could end up in Chinese hands 20 years from now.

Lin Cheng-yi is the director of the Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica.