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BY JUN VELASCO
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Friday, February 23, 2018
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IT’S NOW peacemaker Joe’s take on the uneasy Iran-Saudi Arabia rivalry!
Our friend, former five-time Speaker Joe de Venecia Jr., continues to baffle us.
Instead of taking the easy road to a relaxed state of life — he is now 81! — Uncle Joe (we call him “uncle” by our marriage to his niece Cathy de Venecia-Gaerlan-Bernardo) — has unceasingly pushed, literally, that is (using his 350-member International Conference of Asian Political Parties) for the attainment of world peace.
Recently, JdV, who is President Duterte’s special envoy for intercultural dialogue and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), was upfront in bringing to a friendly dialogue the leaders of China and the Philippines and other countries embroiled in misunderstanding over the ownership of the West Philippine Sea.
The Philippines was declared the rightful owner of the area by the Permanent Court Arbitration in the Hague but political reality involving the Bully China and our puny country has required us to be less assertive, to the chagrin of Deputy Chief Justice Antonio Carpio (classmate of our Dagupeno cumpadre George Regutara) who led the Philippine battery of lawyers.
We consider President Duterte’s conciliator behavior to the Philippines’ new friend China a masterstroke in diplomacy, a field which incidentally, is JdV’s cup of tea. It was JdV who first conceptualized the shelving of the sovereignty issue to make way for joint oil-and-gas drilling in the simmering oil-rich WPS (West Philippine Sea).
Back to JdV’s newest diplomatic tack urging Iran and Saudi Arabia to go to the negotiation table because it is feared that differences between the two major Muslim countries could ignite a disastrous confrontation.
In his address in Tehran, very recently De Venecia said: “On the raging Sunni-Shiite issues and the extremist violence in the Arab world with the emergence of ISIS-ISIL in the battlegrounds of Syria and Iraq and even Libya, we cannot discount the magnitude of the barriers that intense doctrinal separation has raised between the two great schools of Islam, and the emergence today of the radical, violent extremists ISIL-ISIL, some of whose splinter groups are moving into Southeast Asia, into Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.”
De Venecia recalled the comparable “bloody Catholic-Protestant conflicts in Europe that ran for centuries have long since ended, the more recent achievement being the Good Friday peace agreement that ended the brutal politico-religious Catholic-Protestant wars in Northern Ireland.”
Citing as heart-warming Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif proposal for a “Dialogue among Civilizations” which would have the two countries talk peace (hopefully), a position aired before former Iran President Hashemi Rafsanjani died, the situation would, in De Venecia’s optimistic words, “form the basis for global peace that will endure.”
JdV, no doubt, is busy plugging holes that make UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez’s job easier. Gutierrez is the successor of South Korea’s Ban Ki-moon, who had served from Jan. 1, 2007 to Dec. 31, 2016. We felicitate Rep. Leopoldo Bataoil and Cebu Rep. Gwen Garcia, national president and chair of ICPP respectfully, for their roles as JdV’s brain trusts.
While munching his seemingly hard-to-digest view (let’s not forget that JdV shocked our fabled isles in 1964 when he moved for the transfer of Clark to Mindanao — an impossible dream at the time), we are impressed with his “indomitable” spirit when he declared, “We in ICAPP and in the international organizations… must learn to create space for other systems and alternative faiths.” He added “we must all accept that peace is much more than the absence of conflict.”
And here is the punch line, “We must take to heart the simple truth that peace indeed is a community of sharing; that we all belong to one great human family under God.”
Need we say more? (juanitomvelasco@yahoo.com/PN)
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