Meeting with Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi; journey to the Himalayas; next visit: Iran
WE were travelling most of last month to Myanmar (which we, the older ones, still remember as Burma), to the Kingdom of Bhutan, high on the Himalayas; Dubai, the small bustling air travel and trading center of the United Arab Emirates, home to hundreds of thousands of Filipino overseas workers; and on to Iran, which everyone knows as the seat of the old Persian Empire, and which today is one of the leading petroleum powers, with Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the US.
From Yangon, the old capital, my wife Gina and I travelled to the geographic center of the nation, Naypyidaw, the newly proclaimed capital. We were fortunate that in spite of the raging Rohingya crisis, where today some 500,000 Muslims, who had been living in Myanmar for decades were fleeing the endangered region to their ancestral Bangladesh, to escape persecution from the Myanmar military, Aung San Suu Kyi found time to receive us.
We conferred with Myanmar’s constitutional senior government leader, an intelligent no-nonsense lady, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and much admired all over the world. In the last national elections, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, National League for Democracy (NLD), won overwhelming majority of the seats in parliament, in spite of many years under house arrest, but she could not be president under the terms of a military-influenced technicality in the Constitution because her late husband was British. As the senior leader in the Cabinet and largely running the country, she nominated the incumbent president and most cabinet posts, but the powerful ministries, defense, and security, are still held by the generals.
Accompanied by our old friends, Philippine Ambassador to Myanmar Eduardo Kapunan, Jr. and wife Elsa, we asked Aung San Suu Kyi, (who received us three years ago at her residence in Yangon, in the course of an Asian parties conference), to nominate her party’s senior representatives to join the boards of our International Conference of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP), based in Seoul, now composed of more than 340 ruling, opposition, and independent political parties in Asia, and the International Association of Parliamentarians for Peace (IAPP), based in New York, to which she enthusiastically agreed. This week we are sending her ICAPP’s and IAPP’s written invitations so she and her party would present their nominees.
With Ambassador Kapunan, we also raised the possibility of the Philippines acquiring perhaps 25,000 to 50,000 hectares of potential rice fields in Myanmar for a possible government-to-government joint venture or an agreement among the Philippine private sector in partnership with Myanmar, hopefully with the bulk of rice production, following anticipated successful rice growing and shipment to the Philippines. The Philippines has been importing rice from Thailand and Vietnam in large volumes, as far we can remember, even when we were first assigned to Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) as minister – Economic counselor there in 1966-1969 when we were 30, at the height of the Vietnam War. Today Vietnam is one of the world’s major rice exporters, is industrializing and doing well.
Our friend Aung San Suu Kyi expressed much interest in the potential of Myanmar - Philippine economic collaboration and she asked our ambassador to immediately confer with her minister of agriculture. Upon return to Manila, we suggested to San Miguel Corporation Chairman Eduardo Cojuangco, a confirmed, successful, large-scale agriculturist, and San Miguel’s dynamic President Ramon Ang and other leading agricultural-industrial groups to perhaps co-lead a Philippine private sector effort in a consortium that could present a helpful solution to the Philippines’ perpetual rice crisis, with the current massive rice imports every year, largely from Vietnam and Thailand.
The Philippines is fragmented with 7,100 islands while Myanmar’s land is massive, contiguous, perhaps larger than France and Ireland combined, and connected to Asia’s two largest countries, China and India, the latter via Bangladesh. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma used to be ruled by the English Viceroy in British India. President Rodrigo Duterte might consider asking our capable Agriculture Secretary Piñol to look into this potential initiative in Myanmar.
We also asked the popular ambassador and former Armed Forces reformist to raise the possibility of joint Philippine-Myanmar exploration in Myanmar’s rich oil-producing petroleum exploration concessions and explore establishment of an ASEAN-supported or Filipinoled Export Processing Zone with a petrochemical complex, as part of a combined agricultural – industrial initiative. We should be awaiting some feedback.
On the Rohingya crisis, we suggested the UN and ASEAN might propose an appreciable International Red Cross deployment in the Rakhine region, which will help, not inflame the refugees, and not alarm the Myanmar military.
From Myanmar, we flew back to Bangkok as there is no direct flight in the journey to the Kingdom of Bhutan, high on the mountain ranges, next door to Nepal. In the Himalayas, the Nepalese king sometime back was forced to abdicate the throne and gave way to an elected democratic civilian government, while the other Himalayan state Sikkim chose to give up its sovereignty and join the State of India.
We have been to the Himalayas a few times. In Kathmandu, capital of Nepal, the ruling Hindu Party and the Marxist Communist Party have their representatives on our Board in ICAPP. In Bhutan’s Himalayan mountains, we were hoping to check on the Chinese-Indian military stand-off but by the time we reached the capital, the crisis had calmed down, the forces in the highest hills had disengaged.
The well-loved Bhutanese King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck and the prime minister were out of town but we had a delicious luncheon and good conversation with Bhutan’s Chief Justice Dasho Tshering Wangchuck, Foreign Minister Damcho Dorji, acting Speaker of Parliament Zigme Zangpo, and others, hosted by Bhutan’s former ambassador to Thailand and Bangladesh Tsherung Dorji and his lady, who were introduced to us by former Thai Minister Nalinee Taveesin, Gina’s friend, and our current ICAPP representative at the first Asia-Europe Political Forum, which met recently in Seoul, and which will now meet yearly among Asian and European political party leaders.
(We collectively set the trend a few years earlier with our bringing together Latin America’s and the Caribbean’s political parties under their regional organization, COPPPAL, with our ICAPP, followed by our successful encouragement of the founding of the Council of African Political Parties (CAPP), based in Khartoum, which is now a reality).
The Bhutanese leaders indicated their people are not living in paradise but are happy with God and with the world; their land has never been conquered; they live in a happy Kingdom, and national success is not measured in Gross National Product (GNP) but in Gross National Happiness (GNH). Our tourists should consider a visit there.