Taiwan hypocrisy

I would like to comment on the letter from Derek Hsu to The Jakarta Post titled Battered but not giving up, concerning Taiwan's WHO membership.

Again the comments of Derek Hsu, the director of the Taipei Economic and Trade Office, are far-fetched and overstretched.

Taiwan's membership in the WTO is, like Hong Kong's, as a custom territory of China, and its entrance is not based on the issue of sovereignty.

The Red Cross, founded by Swiss philanthropist Henri Dunant and established in 1863, is an international humanitarian agency set up to alleviate human suffering. Taiwan is not a humanitarian agency, and is even considered "a rogue state" in Canadian intelligence reports for having developed, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, as reported in the Straits Times on Dec. 18, 2000.

WHO is a United Nations agency and Taiwan has been recognized by the UN as part of China, a sovereign state that includes Taiwan, with the two separated by an unfinished civil war.

The sovereignty issue is certainly also not similar to the Holy See and the PLO, whose statehood has been recognized by the UN, while Malta gained full independence within the Common Wealth of Nations in 1964 and has been a republic since 1974.

SIA KA-MOU

Jakarta