We Condemn the Taiwan government for Cracking down on Students And Support the Students’ Fight to Make Trade Policies Accountable to the People

We, citizen’s groups in Japan, have been cooperating with citizens of Taiwan to promote peace and democratic rights in the whole region.

We are concerned with the development of the situation in Taiwan after the occupation of the Legislature Yuan on March 18. We fully support the demand of the people for democratic procedures on the trade deals. We also fully support the peaceful actions of students and people occupying the Legislature Yuan.

Your government sent riot police to the site and bloodily cracked down on the students and their supporters. We condemn this brutal repression.

The anti- service trade deal movement in Taiwan carries a significance which goes far beyond Taiwan. It is the most recent struggle against the so called free trade agreement. Similar struggles were kick started in the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle, continued in 2005 by the anti-WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong, and then followed by the Bali anti-WTO actions at the end of 2013.

The Taiwan struggle is just one of the shock waves of this global struggle. Although the movement in each region carries its own uniqueness, the common denominator among all these struggles is still the very same theme of the fight against Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and their impact on democracy and people’s livelihoods.

Today, so-called free trade not only extends to the free flow of capital among nations, it even re-interprets the term “services to encompass many public social services, such as postal services, education, water supply, etc., so as to turn them into business opportunities for TNCs. This actually allows the TNCs to freely exploit the world’s working people and its natural resources.

The TNCs and the governments, acting through free trade agreements, have been promoting privatization, casualization of the labor market, the cutting back of labor rights protection and welfare. The promotion of the free movement of capital around the globe only results in a race to the bottom in terms of labor conditions.

We believe that the people around the world should reject this race to the bottom and fight to harmonize with the highest standard of labor and environmental protection in the world. We do not want to return to autarchy; rather what we want is a globalization from the bottom.

Based on these assumption we express our solidarity to the people in Taiwan and demand the government to listen to the people carefully and sincerely.

April 7, 2014

APWSL (Asia Pacific Workers’ Solidarity Links)
ATTAC Kansai Group
Labor Fiesta Osaka – Association for Seeing Documentary Video
Rodo Joho (Labor Information Magazine), Osaka branch