PEACE-MAKER
It has been a year since the war in Ukraine broke out. The bloodshed, destruction, and humanitarian crisis endure. And the latest developments suggest that the war might escalate and a ceasefire may not happen anytime soon.
The international community, including the Philippines, should continue to encourage, support, and contribute to a peaceful resolution of the crisis in Ukraine. For it is the best interest not just of the Ukrainian people, but of the world, that the killings end.
In our much earlier columns, 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.
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.
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.
The Viet Cong routinely blew up Saigon bars serving American G.Is. We saw dead bodies in the streets of Saigon.
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 – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates – and in Libya, in North Africa.
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.
When the Iran-Iraq broke out, Iranian weaponry pounded our company’s camps in Basra almost immediately, stranding the bulk of our work force, which we eventually had to fly home to the Philippines.
We have noted in this column the continuing conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Libya; the dangers of a military confrontation between the U.S. and Iran; the unresolved Palestinian-Israeli hostilities; the ongoing territorial disputes between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, and between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh; the enduring flashpoint in the Korean Peninsula; the maritime tensions in the West Philippine Sea and East China Sea; and other crisis areas in the global community.
While we are profoundly aware of the historical 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 war, would be immeasurably costly and makes all of us losers.
The world needs peace.