Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Bernard Gagnon/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
LAI CHING-TE IS SET to travel to Eswatini next week in the second overseas trip of his presidential administration. Lai’s trip will be to mark King Mswati III’s 58th birthday, as well as Mswati’s 40th year as Eswatini’s monarch.
Lai is slated to leave on Wednesday and return on April 27th. Lai’s first trip abroad was to Pacific allies such as the Marshall Islands, Palau, and Tuvalu, and included stopovers in Hawai’i and the US territory of Guam. Indeed, Taiwanese political leaders have historically used trips to diplomatic allies as a pretext to have stopovers in the US that are not official diplomatic visits but nonetheless shore up ties with the US.
However, Lai’s trip to Eswatini will have no stopovers. In this sense, Lai’s trip is primarily to shore up ties with Eswatini, as Taiwan’s last ally in Africa.
For its part, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has touted Lai’s Eswatini trip as strengthening ties between Taiwan and the Global South. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has stated that the “Taiwan model” of diplomacy is different from China’s hegemonic expansion.
Nevertheless, such claims from the Lai administration are deeply hypocritical. Eswatini is hardly a democracy; it is one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchies, in which freedom of association is forbidden.
At the same time, one of the reasons why the regime of King Mswati III can maintain power is because of economic and political support from Taiwan. In this sense, Taiwan is no different from China in its diplomatic relations with Eswatini. Certainly, it is not as though Taiwan is seeking to militarily annex a regime, or to carry out debt trap diplomacy. But China is, in many cases, happy to back an authoritarian regime in return for political recognition.
The Lai administration has, in past months, criticized the authoritarian nostalgia of the KMT in comments on Taiwan’s past during the White Terror. But Eswatini’s present is not so different than Taiwan’s past.
The constitution was voided in 1973, and political parties were banned, as a result of which free and fair elections still do not take place in Eswatini today. Although Mswati agreed to constitutional changes in 2005, he retains his grip on power. Under Mswati III’s rule, life expectancy has halved in Eswatini since 2000.
Pro-democracy protests rocked Eswatini in the summer of 2021, with the public calling for the right to vote. In the violence that followed, 28 were shot, with demonstrators alleging that at least twenty were killed. Tear gas was used by police against demonstrators, and Internet services were suspended, with a curfew declared in major urban centers, in which buildings were burned during the turmoil, including Manzini and Mbabane, as well as the industrial center of Matsapha. The Eswatini government denied reports that Mswati III had fled the country during the demonstrations.
Nevertheless, after the demonstrations, Taiwan announced that it would be donating 637 million NT to the government for reconstruction–an act that makes it complicit in the government’s crackdown on the protests. Either way, Taiwan simply chose to act as though the protests had never occurred.
Much as occurred during Taiwan’s authoritarian period, with the killing of dissidents, in 2023, opposition politician Thulani Maseko was killed by unknown gunmen in a shooting widely suspected of being ordered by the monarchy. Maseko was a human rights lawyer and public intellectual. At the time, Mswati III stated, “People should not shed tears and complain about mercenaries killing them,” implying that he had ordered the killing.
Maseko’s widow, human rights defender Tanele Maseko, later visited Taiwan in 2023. Tanele Maseko stated in an interview with New Bloom that she hoped Taiwanese people realized that human rights defenders in Eswatini were labeled terrorists, forcing many into exile, as well as that it proved hypocritical for Taiwan to hope for support from other countries against China, as a democracy, while backing an authoritarian regime and dictator in Eswatini.
Indeed, Taiwan has long been accused of paying off diplomatic allies for recognition through “dollar diplomacy.” This would be through subsidizing infrastructure development projects or paying off politicians through slush funds in its diplomatic allies in return for recognition, so that such allies can continue to speak up for Taiwan in international bodies. It is not at all surprising that many of these countries have questionable human rights records, as diplomatic ties that Taiwan has maintained since its own authoritarian era.
It proves darkly ironic, then, for Lai to travel to Eswatini and tout Taiwan as a democracy, while praising an authoritarian regime that murders activists who were not unlike those that the KMT killed during the White Terror. All this in order to maintain ties with a dictator, throwing the people of Eswatini abroad for Taiwan’s own national interests, much as China conducts its diplomacy.
Given Taiwan’s political and economic heft in Eswatini, it would be possible for Taiwan to push for changes to be made. In that way, Taiwan could win the loyalty of the people of Eswatini in supporting their push toward democracy. After all, one can hardly expect one of the world’s last absolute monarchies to remain in place forever.
As it is, if Eswatini were to democratize, it would be unsurprising to see Eswatini quickly switch ties to China, the larger world economy, and one that could at least claim to have not backed an authoritarian dictator there. But one generally expects the Lai administration, as with the Tsai administration before it, to remain short-sighted on the matter of how Taiwan could influence Eswatini to make changes for the better.