President Chen Shui-bian on May 30 met with Mongolian parliamentarian Lamjav Gundalai at the Presidential Building. President Chen expressed a warm welcome to Parliamentarian Gundalai and thanked the visitor for his long support of Taiwan.
In remarks, President Chen first thanked Parliamentarian Gundalai for sending a letter to the World Health Organization's director-general in 2005 supporting Taiwan's bid to enter the WHO. The following year, when he was serving as the Mongolian minister of health, Parliamentarian Gundalai not only personally attended the 59th World Health Assembly, but also spoke publicly in favor of Taiwan's participation in the world health body. President Chen again expressed his appreciation for this gesture.
The president said that Taiwan and Mongolia maintain an extremely warm and close friendship. This can be traced back to 1997 when President Chen was then Taipei City mayor. At the time, former Ulan Bator Mayor Janlav Narantsatsralt led a delegation to Taiwan to sign a sister city agreement with Taipei. This marked the beginning of close exchanges and cooperation between the two countries. In April 1999 after he was no longer mayor, President Chen led a delegation to Mongolia on a fact-finding tour. At the time, Mayor Narantsatsralt had already become that nation's premier and a consensus was reached to form the Mongolia-Taiwan Association and the Taiwan-Mongolia Association. This not only made an enormous contribution to building friendly ties between the two countries, but also created the foundation for the two nations to later establish representative offices in each other's capital.
President Chen said that when he was elected president in 2000, he immediately initiated legal amendments to formally recognize Mongolia as an independent and sovereign nation, and not a part of the Republic of China. In 2002, a protocol was signed to formally set up representative offices. The Taipei Trade and Economic Representative Office was established in 2002 in Ulan Bator, paving the way for the development of closer relations between the two nations. Over the past several years, the two nations have also signed pacts on cooperation in the areas of labor and health, as well as inked a memorandum of understanding on competition law. The president said both sides are also working on technical cooperation and investment protection agreements.
President Chen said that Mongolia is a successful example of a country moving from communism to democracy. In January of this year, a preparatory meeting of the Global Forum on New Democracies was held in Taipei. Mongolia's first democratically elected president Pusalmaagiyn Ochirbat and his wife came to Taiwan to attend the conference, helping to make the event all the more successful, he said.
President Chen expressed his hope that in the future, Parliamentarian Gundalai will lend support to the establishment of the Taiwan Friendship Group in the Mongolian Parliament, paving the way for further development of economic, medical, scientific, and cultural cooperation and exchanges between the two countries.