The Formosa Foundation is reporting that Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen [R-FL], Chair of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, has agreed to hold hearings on Taiwan’s status in 2011.
Terry Giles, executive director of Formosa Foundation, says the Foundation has been working with Ros-Lehtinen’s staff for several years on hearings and with her elevation to Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee she is in a position to call for hearings.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was quick to confront Hu Jintao on human rights issues during his recent visit to Washington, D.C. The Chinese leader was wined and dined by President Barack Obama but grilled by members of Congress including Ros-Lehtinen.
Representative Don Manzullo [R-IL] chairs the subcommittee dealing with Asia and the Pacific and will be focusing his immediate attention on the People’s Republic of China and North Korea. A spokesman from Manzullo’s office suggested hearings on Taiwan might be considered by the full committee next week.
Brad Goehner, press aide for the Foreign Affairs Committee, confirmed that Taiwan is “very important” to Chair Ros-Lehtinen and hearings this session of Congress were “likely”. Although events in Egypt currently have the Committee’s attention Goehner noted a number of Taiwan issues were not addressed in the last session.
One topic the Foreign Affairs Committee may take on is President Obama’s silence about the District of Columbia U.S. Court of Appeals 2009 admonition to him to “expeditiously” resolve the question of Taiwan’s sovereignty. The federal appellate court said in Roger Lin vs. United States the people of Taiwan were living in a “political purgatory” imposed on them by the United States and it was the executive’s duty to act.
Taiwan has been caught in six decades of a “strategic ambiguity” caused by the Cold War and has been denied self-determination while under occupation of the exiled Republic of China, installed by U.S. military forces after the end of World War II.
The United States is officially the “principal occupying Power” of Taiwan under the San Francisco Peace Treaty but has delegated control of the island to the Chinese Nationalist regime since 1945. The Taiwanese people suffered under four decades of harsh martial law under the Republic of China in-exile while successive U.S. presidents looked the other way.
In 1979, after President Jimmy Carter dropped recognition of the ROC as the legitimate government of China, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act providing for U.S. weapons sales to counter the growing Chinese military threat to the island.
Source: Michael Richardson - Boston Progressive Examiner
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