Demarches by the US and Canadian missions at the UN forced the organization and its Beijing-friendly secretary-general to drop references to Taiwan as being part of ChinaA number of Western governments, with the US in the lead, protested to the UN in 2007 to force the global body and its secretary-general to stop using the reference “Taiwan is a part of China,” a cable recently released by WikiLeaks shows.
The confidential cable, sent by the US’ UN mission in New York in August 2007, said that after returning from a trip abroad, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had met then-US ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad to discuss a range of issues, including “UN language on the status of Taiwan.”
“Ban said he realized he had gone too far in his recent public statements, and confirmed that the UN would no longer use the phrase ‘Taiwan is a part of China,’” said the cable, which was sent to the US Department of State and various US embassies worldwide.
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The cable said that the UN missions of Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand had also consulted with the UN on the subject, adding that in reaction to the US demarche, the Canadian mission had followed with a demarche of its own and “received the same commitment that the UN would no longer use the phrase.”
My article, published today in the Taipei Times, continues here.
2 comments:
Within the coming decades when China and Taiwan will reunify, issue such this, will miss all its meaning and merely adorn some museum's collection to remember next generations about how each foreign country had taken part on this Chinese affair.
Perhaps, but if annexation is eventually realized, then that museum will just as likely be in New York or San Francisco as in Chongqing or Beijing.
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