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TAIPEI - Taiwan's political storm surrounding Typhoon Morakot gained force Wednesday as the defence minister and cabinet secretary offered to resign over the government's slow emergency response.
A new poll suggested 46 percent of people had no confidence in the government's ability to handle reconstruction efforts as President Ma Ying-jeou's approval rating dropped to a near record low of 29 percent.
The number of confirmed dead meanwhile rose to 136, but Ma has warned the death toll could climb to more than 500, with 380 people feared buried by mudslides in the southern village of Hsiaolin alone.
Angry survivors surrounded the president during a visit Wednesday to Hsiaolin. Ma burned incense sticks and bowed before a muddy plain that 12 days earlier was a tidy village.
"President, you've come way too late," a woman shouted at Ma in footage broadcast on cable news channels.
He tried to comfort a woman in a traditional Taiwanese funeral robe, who was performing a Taoist ritual to summon the spirits of her relatives whose bodies have yet to be found.
Defence Minister Chen Chao-min and Cabinet Secretary General Hsueh Hsiang-chuan, in charge of coordination between ministries, offered to step down, a cabinet official said on condition of anonymity.
The first political casualty was vice-foreign minister Andrew Hsia Li-yan, who tendered his resignation on Tuesday -- for refusing overseas aid.
Premier Liu Chao-shiuan has received their resignations and was considering them, the official said.
Lin Hou-wang, a Ma adviser and National Taiwan University philosophy professor, said the prime minister and others should also consider resigning.
"The cabinet needs an overall reshuffle for letting the society down," Lin told AFP.
The cabinet secretary faced personal criticism after angrily justifying himself for dining with his family at a five-star hotel on August 8, the day Morakot struck, saying it was Father's Day in Taiwan and "not out of line".
The defense ministry has been under fire for deploying too few troops during the initial rescue operation, with only 2,100 sent on August 9 before the number was dramatically increased to 43,300 five days later.
Ma and senior officials began a news conference on Tuesday by bowing in a symbolic apology to the Taiwanese people for not recognising the magnitude of the disaster fast enough.
He promised an investigation into mistakes made after the typhoon and vowed to punish officials found to have been negligent, once the probe's results are published next month.
Taiwan will create a national disaster prevention agency and reorient its military to have a greater focus on search-and-rescue operations, Ma said, adding extreme weather posed a greater threat than an invasion by China.
The latest poll by the United Daily News showed Ma's popularity was near the same low it fell to when the financial crisis hit in September. Since then, voters' approval had risen to 56.1 percent in May as the economy perked up.
The poll published Wednesday was based on interviews with 919 people and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percent, the newspaper said.
Typhoon Morakot dumped more than three metres of rain on the island, triggering floods and mudslides which tore through houses and buildings, ripped up roads and smashed bridges.
It was the worst-ever typhoon to strike Taiwan, the president has said, saying the scale of the damage was more severe than a 1959 typhoon that killed 667 people and left around 1,000 missing.
The deadliest natural disaster in the island's history was a 7.6-magnitude quake that claimed around 2,400 lives in September 1999.
- AFP/ir
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