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Editorials
Tuesday, August 15, 2000Taiwan president’s
low-key stopoverThe issue: Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian made a 15-hour stopover in Los Angeles, despite a protest from China.
IN 1994 Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui was refused permission by the State Department to leave his airplane at Honolulu Airport while on a stopover en route to Costa Rica. The reason was opposition to any gesture that might indicate diplomatic recognition of Lee's government, which would anger Beijing.
However, criticism of that decision led the following year to pressure by Congress on the Clinton administration to grant the Taiwan leader a visa to make a private visit to Cornell University, his alma mater. During that visit he met with several sympathetic members of Congress.
The incident enraged the Chinese leadership, which responded by recalling its ambassador from Washington and firing missiles into the Taiwan Strait.
Now Taiwan has a new president, Chen Shui-bian, and he has just made a 15-hour stopover in Los Angeles en route to the Caribbean and Central America. Although Chen tried to avoid calling attention to the stopover, Beijing blasted Washington anyway for permitting it, calling it a breach of pledges against having official contact with Taiwan.
To placate the Clinton administration, the Taiwan leader turned down a meeting with a group of legislators at a private residence and was hustled away from 500 cheering supporters at the airport.
However, Chen did meet briefly with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., who came to his hotel. Rohrabacher said he urged Chen to be strong in the face of challenges from Beijing.
Rohrabacher, a vocal supporter of Taiwan, said he "just went to (Chen's) hotel to talk, one friend to another. I thought it was symbolically important to demonstrate that we respect this man, who has been elected by Taiwan, and that we should not refrain from doing so to placate un-elected people at home and abroad."
Washington considers it particularly important at this time to avoid inflaming relations with China. A furious backlash in Beijing to the Chen visit could endanger passage of a bill granting China permanent normal trade status that is pending in the Senate.
Chen has said he supports normal trade status for Beijing and shows no desire to provoke China by promoting independence for Taiwan. Nevertheless it is an unseemly concession to Beijing for the United States to place such tight restrictions on the leader of a friendly country.
U.N. tribunal OK’d
for Sierra Leone
THE United Nations Security Council has unanimously agreed to set up its third war crimes tribunal in the past decade, this time in response to brutal acts in Sierra Leone. U.N. tribunals have been effective in bringing war criminals to trial for atrocities in the Balkans and Rwanda. Crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone should also be prosecuted.
The Security Council has asked U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to negotiate within 30 days how authority should be shared between Sierra Leone's judicial system and neutral international legal experts. Sierra Leone's U.N. ambassador, Ibrahim Kamara, called the council's action "a very, very bold step...forward in bringing sanity" to the small country on Africa's western coast.
The tribunal will be aimed primarily at Foday Sankoh and other leaders of the rebel Revolutionary United Front. They have been accused of using torture, amputation of limbs and destruction of villages to intimate civilians during Sierra Leone's nine-year civil war.
Sankoh temporarily took 500 United Nation peacekeepers hostage in May, less than a year after he signed a peace agreement with the government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. The U.N. resolution notes that the peace accord's provision for amnesty for crimes committed before July 1999 did not include genocide, crimes against humanity and other violations of international law.
Sankoh can be brought to trial promptly since he now is in the government's custody. The tribunal's U.N. umbrella should prevent Sankoh from bargaining for amnesty, as he has in the past, with Sierra Leone's weakened judicial system. The tribunal may have to be held outside Sierra Leone to achieve the "impartiality, independence and credibility" called for by the Security Council.
The agreement to create the Sierra Leone tribunal may lead the Security Council to move toward creation of a fourth tribunal, to try leaders of the Khmer Rouge for the deaths of more than a million Cambodians in the 1970s. The tribunals are an essential component in the effort to deter crimes against humanity throughout the world.
Published by Liberty Newspapers Limited PartnershipRupert E. Phillips, CEO
John M. Flanagan, Editor & Publisher
David Shapiro, Managing Editor
Diane Yukihiro Chang, Senior Editor & Editorial Page Editor
Frank Bridgewater & Michael Rovner, Assistant Managing Editors
A.A. Smyser, Contributing Editor
