PEACE-MAKER
Jose de Venecia Jr.
Former Speaker of the House
In our previous column, we said we experienced up close some of the most devastating wars in the world.
The first was the Pacific War and the subsequent invasion of Manila by Japan in 1941 when we were five years old, and then the Vietnam War, when we served as a 29-year-old minister and concurrent Economic and Press Counsellor at the Philippine Embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), then South Vietnam from 1966-1969.
We came into close contact with a disastrous war the third time in the 1980s, the Iran-Iraq war, as a pioneering businessman from the late 1970s until the early 1980s in the Middle East and North Africa - - in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Iraq, Jordan, and Libya.
In Saudi Arabia, we operated the Port of Jeddah on the Red Sea and the Port of Jubail in the Persian Gulf as prime contractor in our role then as founding chairman of the Philippines-Singapore Ports Corporation. We also built a large-scale electrification network around the Riyadh central region; highways in Iraq; oil drilling in the Emirate of Ajman, the United Arab Emirates and hit commercial oil there with much joy, until the price of oil plunged from $39 per barrel to $8 per barrel in only a few months, and we had to abandon the well after much tears and wailing, and brought our oil rig and Filipino workforce home, indeed the first Filipino-led oil well abroad with foreign partners, mostly Arab.
During those halcyon days in the Middle East, we had some 50,000 employees as prime contractor and a few times as sub-contractor in various fields, which later led to the employment of millions of Filipinos in succeeding years, lifting Philippine dollar reserves when we began, at $200-million/$300-million to over $109-billion in Philippine foreign exchange reserves today.
At any rate, we lost our hard-earned wealth with our sudden emergency pull-out from the Middle East triggered by the Iraq-Iran war, and our forced abandonment of our some $40-million in infrastructure equipment in the war zone and our tragic expensive repatriation of thousands of our workers back to the Philippines.
The Iran-Iraq war became our undoing and that of the bold Filipino-led conglomerate, Landoil Resources Corporation, which we founded in the early 1970s.
When the Iran-Iraq war broke out, Iranian weaponry pounded Landoil Group camps in Basra almost immediately, stranding the bulk of our work force, which we eventually had to fly home to the Philippines.
We remember that despite the thunder of distant artillery from our business sites in Iraq, we feared little for our personal safety perhaps because it was not the first war zone we were in.
As a small boy, we witnessed the cruelty of some Japanese soldiers against our fellow Pangasinenses during World War II, with our own paternal uncle executed by the Japanese. We also experienced the bombardment of our beloved hometown Dagupan by both the Japanese and American forces.
We were living in Vietnam as a 29-year-old diplomat when Viet Cong routinely blew up Saigon bars serving American G.I.s. Sometimes we saw dead bodies in the streets of Saigon.
Truly war is about destruction, that primitive instinct of nations for conquest. War destroys lives, properties, and dreams.
Perhaps it is partly due to the massive and enduring devastation that the above mentioned wars brought about, which we witnessed at first hand, that as five-time Speaker of the House of Representatives and in our modest venture into political party and parliamentary diplomacy in Asia and the international community, we always try our best to contribute in building an edifice of peace, which is a universal longing and indeed our most shared, yet elusive goal.
The world needs peace. For Asia and the world have had a surfeit of war and violence.
We have earlier noted in this column the continuing bloodshed in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Libya; the fears and dangers of explosion between the U.S. and Iran; the unresolved Palestinian-Israeli hostilities; the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, and between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh; the enduring tension in the Korean Peninsula; the maritime tensions in the South China Sea and East China Sea; and other crisis areas in the global community.
While we are profoundly aware of the historical and cultural roots of many of these conflicts, and the enmity and bitter divisions that have grown between rivals, we cannot turn away from the pursuit of peace because the alternative, which is violence and war, would be immeasurably costly and make all of us losers.