PEACE-MAKER

In our much earlier column, we said that perhaps the confluence of time, circumstance, and geography brought this columnist into close contact with three of the most devastating wars in the world.

The first was the Pacific War (1941 to 1945) and the subsequent invasion of Manila by Japan in 1941. We were five years old when the Japanese troops led by Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma landed in Lingayen Gulf, in our province of Pangasinan in 1941.

We remember to this day hundreds of families hurriedly fleeing Dagupan to seek refuge elsewhere. Our family escaped to our farm in Sta. Barbara town, 15 kilometers west of Dagupan.

As a small boy, we witnessed the cruelty of some Japanese soldiers against our fellow Pangasinenses during World War II. Our own paternal Uncle was executed by the Japanese. We also experienced the bombardment of our beloved hometown Dagupan by both the Japanese and American forces.
We were nine years old when the returning American forces, led by General Douglas MacArthur, established a foothold at the Lingayen Gulf on Jan. 9, 1945 with the American troops storming into our shore in Dagupan.

More than two decades later, we witnessed up close the Vietnam War (1955-1975) when we served as Minister and concurrently Economic and Press Counselor at the Philippine Embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), then South Vietnam, from 1966 to 1969. Vietnam was then a hotbed amid an escalating war with the United States under then President Lyndon B. Johnson.

We were living in Saigon as a 30-year-old diplomat when the Viet Cong routinely blew-up Saigon bars serving American G.Is. We would see 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 (1980-1988), as a pioneering businessman from the late 1970s until the early 1980s in the Middle East — in Saudi Arabia,Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Iraq, Jordan, and Libya in North Africa.
When the Iran-Iraq war broke out, Iranian weaponry pounded Iraqi positions and endangered Landoil Group work camps in Basra almost immediately, stranding the bulk of our work force, which we eventually had to fly home to the Philippines at great cost.

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. We returned home to the Philippines losing almost all of our hard-earned wealth.

War destroys lives, properties, and dreams

Perhaps it is partly due to the massive and enduring devastation that the abovementioned wars brought about, which we witnessed at first hand, that as Speaker of the House of Representatives and in our modest venture later into political party- and parliamentary diplomacy in Asia and the international community, we always tried our best to contribute, even in a small way, in building an edifice of peace, by helping contribute to peace talks, dispelling or easing tensions when armed conflict seemed imminent, as was often the case in Indo-China and the Middle East.

Peace is a universal longing and mankind’s most shared, yet elusive goal.The world needs peace for a long and sustained time and not in intervals. For Asia and the world have had a surfeit of war and violence.

(This is an excerpt of our column with the same title, dated Feb. 20, 2022)