Taiwan Church News 3394 Edition 13 - 19 March, 2017 Church Ministry Protesting Government's New Demarcation Law Of Aborigine's Traditional Area, Taiwan Aborigines Want Their Land BackReported by Lin Yi-yin On February 14, Taiwan's Council of Indigenous Peoples(CIP) announced a new law, entitled as "Demarcation Lawof Aborigine's Traditional Area", caused a big furor among aboriginal society and citizen groups as it evidently excluded about 1 million acres of private lands from the commonly held traditional area and mainly focused to deal those public lands with 0.8 million acres only. Protesting the reactionary backslide of this new demarcation law, many aboriginal groups, including PCT, TayalPeoples Conference, Association for Taiwan Indigenous Peoples' Policy and many others, assembled before Executive Yuan on February 22. The protesting aboriginal groups accused that Taiwan government seemed to give a green light tacitly in this new law to those illegal appropriations and brutal annexation by the government, KMT or financial corporation in the past. "This is equal to destroy the sanctity and integrity of the traditional area of the aborigines!", protested Mayaw Biho, a famous aboriginal movie director and the spokesman of this protesting event. DPP lawmaker Su Chiau-huei, in her letter to local newspaper Liberty Times, pointed out there were two bigmistakes in CIP's new law: first, it severely restricted the boundaries of traditional area of the aborigines; second, it goes against the very autonomy principle stipulated in article 21 of The Indigenous People's Basic Law. On March 8, a press conference was also held by the representatives, from each aboriginal peoples' conferenceTsao, Paiwan, Tayal, Sediq, Bunnun, and Tarok, asking the Legislative Yuan should check into details about this new proposed by CIP and stop its legislature to become a legal bill. Translated by Peter Wolfe |