PEACE-MAKER Jose de Venecia Jr.
Former Speaker of the House The United Nations celebrates its 75^th founding anniversary this year in the midst of the raging coronavirus plague, which has infected more than 40 million people and claimed more than one million human lives worldwide, devastated the global economy, and rendered more than 200 million individuals jobless throughout the world. In the face of the deadly virus which transcends national, regional, and even hemispheric boundaries, there is truly a greater need for dialogue, solidarity, and cooperation among countries, as no nation can solely face, and conquer, this global health emergency. We have spent these last two decades bringing together Asia’s political groupings into the International Conference of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP); and our national legislatures into the Asian Parliamentary Assembly (APA), both of which have grown rapidly into advanced organizations, worthy of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). We have discovered that the human impulse toward unity is so strong that, in both cases, we have succeeded beyond our expectations. ICAPP has on its membership some 350 ruling, opposition, and independent political parties in 52 countries in Asia and has working cooperation with the political parties of Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. APA now has 40 member-parliaments. It was earlier called the Association of Asian Parliaments for Peace (AAPP), until we proposed in Islamabad in December, 2006 its conversion from AAPP to become the Asian Parliamentary Assembly (APA), in hopes it can be a forerunner of an eventual Asian Parliament like the European Parliament or African Parliament. As speaker of the House of Representatives and in the course of our foray in parliamentary and political party diplomacy, we had the privilege of meeting several UN secretaries-general, namely U Thant, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Kofi Anan, and Ban Ki-moon, all men of peace. Much earlier, as a 29-year-old economic minister and press counsellor at the Philippine Embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh) from 1966 to 1969, during the Vietnam War, we had chance of meeting then UN Secretary General U Thant of Burma (now Myanmar). U Thant was credited with helping resolve the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when the nuclear powers, the US and Soviet Union, were on the brink of a collision course, which placed the world under the threat of a nuclear inferno. He served as UN chief for ten years, from 1961 to 1971, following the death of his predecessor Dag Mammarskjold in a plane crash. Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru, whom we met when we were acting chairman of the foreign relations committee of the House of Representatives in the Eighth Congress, was a skilful negotiator and peacemaker, whose two-term stint as UN secretary general, from 1982 to 1986 and from 1987 to 1991, coincided with some of the most tumultuous events in the second half of the 20^th century, among them the Cold War. He played a crucial role in ending the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted eight years, from 1980 to 1988, as well as in the signing of the Cambodian peace accord, which ended the conflict and bloodshed in the country. As speaker of the House of Representatives, we had the privilege of conferring with at the UN headquarters in New York with then UN Secretaries General Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, Kofi Annan of Ghana, and Ban Ki-moon of South Korea. It was during the time of Kofi Anan, a 2001 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, when we in the Philippines succeeded in establishing an Interfaith Dialogue in the UN in 2005, as a way of helping resolve politico-religious conflicts, strengthening the religious moderates, and isolating those who advocate terrorism and violent extremism in the name of religion. The Interfaith Dialogue was a major victory for the Philippines in international diplomacy and our country’s contribution in advancing the cause of global peace. Since then, not only the United Nations and individual governments, but also civil society groupings, have been holding these dialogues at local, national, regional and international levels. We met with Ban Ki-moon when he was UN secretary general and, later, chairman of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), following his retirement from the UN. In our capacity as founding chairman of the International Conference of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP) and co-chairman of the International Association of Parliamentarians for Peace (IAPP), we had the privilege of sharing the stage with him at various international conferences. As UN secretary general, he graciously accepted our invitation to speak several times at our ICAPP and IAPP conferences. On his invitation, we addressed the Global Green Growth Institute’s meeting in Seoul in October, 2018. Among Ban Ki-moon’s remarkable international initiatives was the historic 2015 Paris Agreement, which elevated the battle against climate change to the forefront of the global agenda.