PEACE-MAKER
The lingering conflicts and potential flashpoints in Asia, with possible wide-ranging catastrophic consequences, obstruct our region’s progress and peaceful development.
While there exists a number of mechanisms to promote peace and resolve conflicts, we believe there is a need to contribute and augment those ongoing efforts.
Thus, we have spent these last two decades bringing together Asia’s political groupings into the ICAPP; and our national legislatures into the Asian Parliamentary Assembly (APA), both of which have grown rapidly into advanced organizations.
The Asian impulse toward unity is so strong that, in both cases, we have succeeded beyond our expectations.
ICAPP has on its list some 350 political parties – ruling, opposition and independent – from 52 countries in Asia, including the major political parties in the Philippines.
Seoul is home to the Secretariat of ICAPP, headed by our chairman Chung Eui-yong who earlier served as South Korea’s minister of foreign affairs and, much earlier, national security adviser.
This columnist decided to transfer the ICAPP Secretariat from Manila, where ICAPP was founded and launched in September 2000, to Seoul in 2006, in our humble desire to contribute, even in a modest way, to help foster peace and reconciliation in the Korean peninsula through the channel of political parties.
South Korea’s mainstream political parties and North Korea’s Workers Party are members of ICAPP.
Meanwhile, APA now has some 40 member-parliaments and 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.
We also transferred the APA headquarters from Manila to Tehran to bring APA into an Asia-wide organization, instead of limited to East Asia, and to help bring Iran into the mainstream.
Together with former Thai Deputy Prime Minister and former Foreign Minister Surakiart Sathirathai, we co-founded the Asian Peace and Reconciliation Council (APRC) in Bangkok in September 2012. It is composed of former heads of governments, leaders of parliament, foreign ministers, and policy-makers. APRC aims to assist governments and organizations in peace-building and conflict resolution in Asia and other areas.
We also regard as eminently praiseworthy the establishment in Washington, DC, in December 2016, of the International Association of Parliamentarians for Peace (IAPP), composed of former and incumbent members of parliament as distinguished from the institutional parliaments themselves.
We can never understate our need for peace, especially in the light of the many difficult, intractable political, territorial, religious, separatist, ideological, and ethnic conflicts in Asia and in various parts of the world.