PEACE-MAKER

Former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon visited our country recently where he conferred with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in Malacañang and made a historic visit to the Senate, where he delivered a speech.

Ban Ki-moon now chairs the Seoul-based Global Green Growth Institute or GGGI, an international organization “dedicated to supporting and promoting strong, inclusive and sustainable economic growth in developing countries and emerging economies.”

On Ban Ki-moon’s invitation, we addressed the GGGI executive council meeting in Seoul on October 2018. At the same time, the GGGI and our organization, the International Conference of Asian Political Parties or ICAPP, co-organized the Special Workshop on Green Cities as an important first step to help in shaping policies, sharing knowledge, and championing green growth in the region and throughout the globe. Ban Ki-moon stressed that “our struggle for global sustainability will be won or lost in cities.”

The participants recognized the value and importance of the Special Workshop, which greatly contributed to broadening the perspectives of the political leaders present to develop their own policy recommendation on environmental issues.

Convinced that the two organizations should continue to work together, the ICAPP and the GGGI also signed a Memorandum of Understanding “to formalize a framework of cooperation in support of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Paris Climate Agreement, building on their comparative advantages and ensuring their complementarity and mutual reinforcement.”

We wish to mention that we had the privilege of conferring with Ban Ki-moon at his office in New York when he was secretary general. He also accepted our invitation to address the conferences organized by the International Conference of Asian Political Parties and the International Association of Parliamentarians for Peace (IAPP), which we led then.

We shared the stage with him in various international fora, among which were on climate change, an issue that is close to his heart, and on the Korean Peninsula.

Among Ban Ki-moon’s remarkable initiatives as UN secretary general was the 2007 Climate Change Summit, which elevated the battle against climate change to the forefront of the global agenda. He led the difficult negotiations for the historic 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which was ratified by 196 countries and organizations. The Paris Agreement was a momentous achievement in combating climate change, which is a clear and present danger that threatens our planet Earth.

As UN secretary general, he also spearheaded the creation of the UN Women, devoted to gender equality and empowerment of women.

We are delighted to mention that our current chairman in the ICAPP standing committee, Chung Eui-yong, has been a colleague of Ban Ki-moon in the South Korean foreign ministry in their younger days.

Chung Eui-yong, who previously served as his country’s national security adviser and then foreign minister, helped broker the historic summits between South Korean president Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un; and between Kim Jong-un and then US president Donald Trump.

The South Korean capital has been home to the Secretariat of the International Conference of Asian Political Parties since 2006, when we decided to transfer it from Manila to Seoul as our modest contribution in encouraging direct talks between Seoul and Pyongyang.

The major political parties of South Korea and North Korea’s Korean Workers Party are members of the ICAPP, now composed of 352 ruling and opposition parties from 52 countries in Asia.

We are pleased to mention that when we founded and launched ICAPP in Manila 22 years ago, on September 2000, one of those who came was former South Korean president Kim Young-sam, who led his country from 1993 to 1998 and was widely credited for strengthening South Korea’s democracy.