CNS News: UN Head Criticized for Taiwan Rejection

CNS news, which appears to be a right-wing news site, carried an article today on the criticisms aimed at UN Sec-Gen. Ban for his decision to reject Taiwan's application to the UN under the name Taiwan:

But Ban got it wrong, experts pointed out. While the resolution recognized the PRC as the only legitimate representative of China at the U.N., it "said nothing at all about Taiwan being part of China," noted American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Gary Schmitt in an article posted Monday.

The Taiwan-based China Post said in an editorial that Ban's interpretation had "made quite a stir here" and "raised many eyebrows."

Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian wrote to Ban again, pointing out the error.

Chen also noted that according to U.N. rules, "only the Security Council and the General Assembly have the authority to review and decide on U.N. membership
applications. The UN Secretariat does not have the power to decide on such
matters."

The letter was returned, however. Ban spokeswoman Marie Okabe said the correspondence from Taiwan "could not be received" due to resolution 2758, and was therefore returned by the U.N.'s office of legal affairs.

Gary Schmitt, now at AEI, is a former PNAC member (when are progressives going to get off their asses and stop leaving Taiwan to the Right?) has posted an essay at AEI. He notes:

Putting aside the fact that passage of the resolution itself--by a simple majority vote of the General Assembly--was a violation of the U.N.'s own rules for addressing such questions, U.N. Resolution 2758 did not deal with the issue of Taiwan. Indeed, as a matter of history and international law, the San Francisco Peace Treaty--the 1951 accord signed by 49 states formally ending the war with Japan--explicitly left open "the future status of Taiwan." And to this day it has not been formally settled. As recently as this summer, the State Department allowed that, as far as the U.S. government was concerned, the PRC is "the sole legal government of China, [but] we have not formally recognized Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan." Unless Secretary-General Ban has now taken on a second job as a foreign policy spokesman for China, he has exceeded his brief in conflating the question of who represents China at the U.N. with the status of Taiwan.

There is in fact no good reason for Taiwan or, if one prefers, the Republic of China, not to be a member of the United Nations. Certainly, the U.N. is no stranger to figuring out ways to accommodate membership for states with complicated or even dubious sovereignty issues. From the start, for example, the Soviet Union insisted that Ukraine and Byelorussia, today's Belarus, have votes in the General Assembly along with its own, despite the fact that both republics were clearly governed by and from Moscow. Or take India, a member even before its formal split with Britain.

Schmitt ends with a couple of strong observations:

However, giving the people of Taiwan their due seems to be the last thing on anyone's mind these days. Rather, placating Beijing by letting it dictate what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to Taiwan's international personality is the order of the day. Yet doing so only reinforces in China's mind that it can get away with bullying Taiwan every chance it gets--which in turn feeds Taiwan's need to push back, if for no other reason than national self-respect.

Even the Kuomintang, the main opposition in Taiwan to President Chen's Democratic Progressive party and the party most open to some sort of official reconciliation with the mainland, is supporting initiatives seeking U.N. membership. And the reason is pretty straightforward. In today's Taiwan, if you want to win an election, you have to show you care about maintaining the country's sovereignty. Until Washington understands that dynamic, it will continually be taken by surprise by the democratic politics of Taiwan. And unless Washington begins to take a more assertive position in helping Taiwan find its space on the international stage, it can count on being caught up in a cycle of Taiwan Strait crises that are getting no less dangerous for all involved.

Perhaps a good, first step in breaking this cycle would be for the folks at Foggy Bottom to make clear to the new secretary-general that a "clarification" by him is in order.

Hopefully the fog at Foggy Bottom will soon be dispelled........

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