Foreign News Conference
President Ma Ying-jeou Opening Remarks
August 18, 2009
Mr. Vice President, Mr. Vice Premier, ministers, members of the press corp, ladies and gentlemen, today I want to say a few words before responding to your questions. First, Typhoon Morakot has brought to Taiwan the highest rainfall in history, causing great damage to the southern part of Taiwan. So far, more than 100 people passed away, and many more are missing. The damages to roads, bridges, houses, rice patty fields, and fishing farms have been very serious. The damages could be as high as 100 billion NT. As the president of this country, certainly we feel that in the whole process of prevention and rescue, there are things we have to correct and we also will be responsible for whatever mistakes or neglect government officials have made. But no matter what these mistakes or neglects are it is my responsibility as president of this country. So, an hour ago when I met with our local press, members on the table stood up and bowed to the country to demonstrate our sincere apology for failure to act faster and in a more orderly way. In the last 10 days ever since the beginning of the disaster, the rescuers actually evacuated more than 39,000 people, and among those, more than 8,800 were evacuated by helicopters. If we have had good weather we would be able to do it faster and better, but no matter what we have done, if there are mistakes or other neglect of duty, I have a consensus with the premier that we will make a decision on punishment and maybe changes of officials no later than early September. But at the moment, from now to early September, we hope the rescuers and other people who are engaging in resettlement and recovery would have the needed time to do their job. Many of the rescuers have worked day and night for more than 10 days, and 6 of them were accidentally killed either by a helicopter crash or drowned in the flood. They really work very very hard to try to rescue our people. We want people to understand that many rescue workers have done a very difficult but good job, but we certainly recognize that there are still many things to be desired. So we recognize that and apologize to our people. We also want to thank the people in Taiwan, particularly those who have donated and volunteered in the disaster area.
This is a very sad moment for Taiwan, on the other hand this is also the moment that people in Taiwan feel that we are one family. We also want to thank the international community. We have received donations from the US, Japan, Singapore, and since from mainland China. There are actually 59 countries which have demonstrated their willingness to help us. We don't feel alone, we live in a global village, these are our true feelings. So what to do in the future? We have reviewed the disaster prevention and rescue mechanism and believe that we should transform the current Fire Fighter Department to a Disaster Prevention and Rescue Administration. We will provide more personnel, higher budget, and set up branch offices in counties in order to establish an elaborate system of disaster prevention and rescue. In addition, in the future, the armed forces of this country will have disaster prevention and rescue as their main job, so they have to change their strategy, tactics, their personnel arrangements, their budgets and their equipment in order to gear to the needs of disaster prevention and rescue. We are now purchasing 60 black hawk helicopters from the US, but we have decided to take 15 out, and use that money, roughly 300 million USD, to purchase helicopters for disaster relief and other equipment. There's another area of importance, which is in the area of disaster prevention, particularly evacuation. This has played a very important role in Typhoon Morakot. Because out of the seven counties that were hard hit by the disaster, at least three had effectively evacuated thousands of people who have avoided the fate of the disaster and reached safe places. So this is something we will continue to do to reach, to educate, and to train our citizens that in case of warnings, they should follow the arrangements of the government to prevent the events of the disaster. Another point, regarding the celebration of our National Day on October 10, we will cancel all celebration activities. And my originally scheduled trip to the South Pacific will also be cancelled. Now we have entered a new phase of disaster relief, which is resettlement and recovery. We have already announced many welfare arrangements for people affected by this disaster, so we will try our best to do a better job than the rescue work, which has been criticized for being too slow and too disorderly. Certainly, we will do our job right this time, thank you very much.