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InsideHW journalists denied to visit Computex |
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Written by Enis Sahinovic
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Friday, 01 June 2007 |
 As some of you might know, Taiwan has just a few embassies located around the world due to complicated political relations with Republic of China. Taiwan and China are world's largest manufacturers of hardware and Taiwan is also host of popular IT business expo Computex that we had chance to attend during last few years. However, Taiwan's Embassy in Budapest, Hungary decided not to let us visit the Computex in Taipei this year. Namely, my colleague Zeljko Djuric and myself applied for Taiwan visa 2 weeks ago in Budapest, even we preferred Vienna, but they didn't let us apply there because Budapest was named as responsible for our countries of origin. They even said that it's better for us because whole process takes less time. If only we knew...
Along with visa applications, we provided invitations from our Taiwan partners and even from TAITRA, Taiwan Trade Center responsible for organization of expo itself. We made sure to explain and write down that our visa should be from June 1st in order to arrive to Taiwan and attend Computex. However, one week later, Taiwan Embassy in Budapest decided to let us know that they won't issue visas next week because whole process takes three weeks!?
We tried to talk to them and even our friends from Taiwan and TAITRA called them, but without any success. They've simply decided to give us visas next week, forcing us to miss the Computex. "Visa process takes 3 weeks", they claim. Last year, Zeljko got his visa for 7 days. Remember Taiwan Embassy in Vienna? Our friend and colleague, Theo Valich from Inquirer, visited Vienna on Wednesday and got his visa within 2 hours after applying. This information casts some doubt on "3 weeks process", doesn't it? It would be so much easier to accept that our visa applications were denied for whatever reason, but instead they were delayed.
For reasons we cannot understand, Taiwan Embassy in Budapest decided not to let journalists attend Computex show in Taipei casting so much doubt about whole thing, since TAITRA is promoting Computex whole year, inviting us for press conferences during CeBIT and so on. We suppose that if we were from traditional press, whole thing would get related even to basic journalists rights.
Unfortunately, this will affect our business negatively because we were setting up meetings and accepting various invitations for press conferences for weeks. We sincerely apologize to all of our partners and colleagues that we were supposed to meet during Computex. We still have great memories of Taiwan and Computex from last year. Hopefully, such things won't happen in future and we hope that our colleagues from press won't have to go through same process.
Enis Sahinovic
Editor-in-Chief
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