Intercultural dialogue and gov’t national unity

President Rodrigo Duterte’s appointment of Jose de Venecia as Special Envoy for Intercultural Dialogue is a welcome move as the former five-time Speaker’s long-time advocacy is that dialogue among people from various cultures, races and ideologies is the key to healing conflicts to achieve peace in the global community.

For de Venecia, reaching agreements through dialogue would hasten the seemingly impossible conclusion of fierce quarrelling among Christians and Muslims and Muslims-against-Muslims in Mindanao, the centuries-old Sunni-Shiite hostilities, and solving the controversy over the Spratlys.

His peace messaging has crossed continents, leading to the establishment and his chairing of the International Conference of Asia Political Parties (ICAPP) representing more than 350 ruling, opposition and independent political parties in Asia, and the International Association of Parliamentarians for Peace (IAPP), which he co-chairs with veteran former US Congressman Dan Burton.

Back home, de Venecia actively urges holding of dialogues between all conflicting forces. In a recent visit to Pangasinan, his home province, he shared his views with some of 70 multi-party congressmen led by Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez and Majority Floor Leader Rudy Fariñas. He said that “In the light of President Duterte’s continuing national popularity, he should perhaps consider launching soon a government of national unity to achieve various strategic objectives.”

First is mobilizing public opinion “to ensure success of the declaration of Martial Law in Mindanao,” and second, “attending to the controversy with China in the Spratlys in the South China Sea, in a geo-political settlement that should include Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei in permanent peace.”

“The president,” he said, “should invoke the global inter-faith dialogue and specifically activate the heretofore positive public response in earlier years to the Christian-Muslim dialogue in Mindanao, undertaken before by Catholic and Protestant bishops and by Muslim Ulama religious leaders.”

The initiative of Christian-Muslim dialogue in Mindanao should lead to the long-desired re-activation of the global interfaith dialogue initiated by de Venecia which was approved at the United Nations since 2004, “hopefully to reactivate the long-frozen Sunni-Shi’ite dialogue between the two contending forces of Islam.”

He said ideally the dialogue should be led by the symbolic leader of the Shi‘ite community, Supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, and the titular leader of the Sunnis, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, for a possible historic meeting in Mecca. This, he said, “will hopefully create the beginnings of a historic settlement that could end the deadly violent inter-Muslim and allied conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan and parts of West Africa.”

The initiative is “most difficult but not impossible,” he said, pointing as example the bloody Catholic-Protestant conflicts in Europe that ran for centuries and have long since ended, the latest achievement being the more recent “Good Friday” peace agreement that ended the brutal wars in Northern Ireland.

De Venecia told me that President Duterte should reactivate the dormant Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) Peace Agreement of 1996, signed with Nur Misuari, and complete the long-awaited Peace Agreement between the Duterte government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), formerly led by its late founder and chairman Salamat Hashim and now headed by Chairman Ibrahim Al-Hajj Murad, in a united front with government, possibly even joined by the New People’s Army in Mindanao – “if there is a verifiable genuine collaboration that will endure among the various disparate forces in Mindanao that would lead to a permanent peace.”

He recollects that Generals Manuel Yan and Fortunato Abat, Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita, and President Ramos designed and finalized the peace agreement with the MNLF, the separate ceasefire and final peace agreement with the military rebels RAM-YOU. De Venecia  journeyed to Utrecht in the first phases of the peace talks with the Communist NDF/New People’s Army, and later, with the late Rep. Jose Yap and Secretaries Bebot Bello, Manny Braganza and Jesus Dureza. With the MNLF, he and his wife Gina crossed the Sahara desert twice in talks in North Africa with Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi and rebel leader Nur Misuari.

Accordingly, informal peace conversations with the Abu Sayyaf in Sulu and Basilan could be considered, and not totally ignored, de Venecia added. “For a wide-ranging omnibus peace in Mindanao is expected by the people and should include everyone, but obviously hard-boiled serial killers should be hunted down and not included in an amnesty program.”

He said, “The NPA offers of collaboration in the anti-ISIS war efforts are sudden and interesting and should perhaps first be validated to help completely stop the ISIS intrusion in the South and hopefully lead as well to the eventual demise of the Abu Sayyaf.”

As regards the Spratlys, de Venecia said, “Even with the building of Chinese fortifications in the disputed sea, peace is not impossible, and a temporary shelving of the issue of sovereignty also claimed by all sides, was much earlier advised by China’s then wise and paramount ruler Deng Xiaopeng, to create the impetus for a geo-political settlement in the sea. Indeed, if there is collective will, even the fortifications can be converted easily to tourism, oil-drilling and weather stations and fishery destinations commonly owned. He said the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, even Taiwan, each claims sovereignty and each claims constitutional backing.”

De Venecia is no Johnny-come-lately. He first made his proposal for peace in the South China Sea in a speech in the 1970s in Baguio City before the National Jaycees.

Interestingly, he talks about sharing of resources by countries.

For example, “as a result of intelligent and pragmatic diplomacy” in the Norwegian Ekofisk oilfield in the deep sea – which he visited when he was president of the Petroleum Association of the Philippines in the 1970s – the discovered oil in the North sea conveniently goes to Norway and to Teeside, England and the natural gas is piped to Germany.

The oil in the Caspian Sea countries is shared by Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan “because among them there is demarcation and practical mutual understanding and goodwill.”

Australia and East Timor share the hydrocarbons in the South Pacific in the sea just below Darwin and on the southeast side of Asia’s newest republic.

The 1989 Agreement between Malaysia and Thailand now enable them to jointly develop their disputed waters. The Guinea-Bissau and Senegal Agreement of 1993 helped concerned countries develop their disputed waters.

De Venecia said it would be a good idea if President Duterte reappoints Vice-President Leni Robredo and invite Mar Roxas and MILF-MNLF leaders to the government “since the communists are already in the Cabinet to be part of a real unity government.”

Some confusion ensued when it was announced by Malacañang that he had been appointed Special Envoy for Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). But to date, his designation as Special Envoy of President Duterte for Inter-Cultural Dialogue has not been cancelled. The statesman said he is taking on the two responsibilities without salary.

He has a good word for Foreign Affairs Secretary Allan Cayetano. “He has had training in the House of Representatives and the Senate which gives him all-around strategic facility in designing and implementing foreign policy.”

JDV, 80,  still lives an active life with his wife, former Congresswoman Gina de Venecia, herself president for two terms of the 85-member Congressional Spouses Foundation, and who led three goodwill parliamentary missions to China. Their son, Congressman Christopher de Venecia, is assistant majority floor leader, and an older son, Jose de Venecia III, is honorary consul of Azerbaijan.

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