Chirac and the Muslim mosque in the south; brief Qatar visit and tension in Persian Gulf

WE were in Paris with wife Gina when former French President Jacques Chirac passed away. He was 86 years old.

World leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and Russian President Vladimir Putin joined French President Emmanuel Macron in paying tribute to Chirac, with Macron hailing the late two-term president as a “great Frenchman.”

Chirac, one of the most popular public figures in France and Europe, whose political career spanned some 50 years, served his country as president for 12 years, two-time prime minister, mayor of Paris for 18 years, and cabinet minister in various capacities. He was also an officer in the French Army during the Algerian War.

The late French leader strongly opposed the US-led war in Iraq in 2003, which was considered by many as one of his most notable foreign policy decisions as president. He was also a steadfast advocate of the European Union.

This columnist as then speaker of the House of Representatives remembers with honor and gratitude receiving in Paris in 2005 from then President Chirac the prestigious French Legion of Honor, the Grand Cross, which was also previously awarded to President Fidel V. Ramos, President Corazon Aquino, President Manuel Quezon, Foreign Minister Carlos P. Romulo, and Press Secretary Teodoro Benigno, who used to work for the Agence France Press (AFP) in Manila.

We are also happy to note that in 2008, as co-president of the French Legion of Honor Association in the Philippines and with then French ambassador to Manila Gerard Chesnel, we contributed even in a modest way to help rebuild the first Muslim mosque in the Philippines, located in Tawi-Tawi, built in the first years of Islam in the Philippines by Muslims from the Arab world and converts in Indonesia and Mindanao.

The mosque was built in 1380, some 141 years before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers in the Philippines in 1521.

Our good friend Ambassador Chesnel and we considered it a “small, humble project but it symbolizes Christian-Muslim solidarity in a strategic isle of the Sulu Sea where Islam began in the Philippines.”

We said to him that while we achieved something noteworthy in the country’s deepest south, we should also consider doing something that could be noteworthy in our country’s farthest north in the Batanes islands. We should talk to our old friend, former congressman and secretary Butch Abad, about building a modest memorable project that we and France could perhaps undertake in our farthest north to match our memorable project in the farthest south.

We also regarded the project in the southernmost isle as a “dramatic expression of friendship and confluence of Philippine and French foreign policy.”

We should speak with the new well-regarded French Ambassador Nicholas Galey whether we could again work with France to establish a joint modest project in the farthest north in Batanes, to match our modest little work in the deepest south at the end of the Sulu archipelago.

The French Legion of Honor is an order of chivalry established by French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 and is the oldest and highest ranking medal of honor in France.

After recovering from flu at almost age 83 and missing a speech before the International Conference of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP) in Baku, Azerbaijan, three weeks ago, we moved on to the south of France and to Lourdes for a month-long vacation, our first after several years of hectic speaking engagements in the international community. We were with wife Gina, sister-in-law Chona Ampil, stepson Philip Cruz III, business executive Tony Reyes, and our Assistant Joy Cristobal.

We accepted a kind and most enjoyable invitation from the famous couple, Christian Baverey, scion of a great industrialist French family from Lyon, and his wife Tetta Agustin, who is highly regarded in Europe’s fashion houses and who continues to do active charity work when she and her husband visit the Philippines every year.

We boarded their yacht Tosca, named after their bright and beautiful daughter, lawyer and successful entrepreneur in Brazil and Portugal, and sailed the Mediterranean with brief stops in Nice, Monaco, the Italian coastal waters of San Remo, Lavagne, Portofino, and Sta. Margheritain, the French and Italian Mediterranean.

We wished we sailed further to Athens, Greece, where in the mid-70s, we scored a coup as an aggressive entrepreneur by purchasing an old cruise ship, docked in Piraeus, Athens, without an engine, and which we purchased for $5.6-million to house our 3,000 workers in Jeddah for the operation of the Port of Jeddah, then a much-needed project in the mushrooming newly oilrich Middle East.

The port was so busy that without our army of stevedores and port managers, cargo ships docked offshore had to haul their cargo onshore through helicopters, a most expensive way of stevedoring.

We were then a young aggressive entrepreneur, and decided to bid as prime contractor for the Port of Jeddah, the largest then in the Arab world, which was opened for bidding to manage the port, Saudi Arabia’s main entry point in the Red Sea. We had signed a joint venture agreement with the Singapore Port Authority, and created the Philippines-Singapore Ports Corporation, which was successful in winning the bid. We acquired a large ship without engine in the Port of Piraeus in Greece, and had it towed across the Aegean Sea, into the Suez Canal, and into Jeddah. As we had written before, the vessel arrived in Jeddah in early morning as some ten commercial 707 jets flew in from Manila with stevedores and port executives for immediate deployment in the Jeddah port.

We won the bid for the Jeddah port, not because we were the best but the big port operators from the US, UK, Italy, South Korea, and Japan could only start operations in Jeddah after two years since they first had to build permanent housing barracks for their large workforce.

We outwitted them and won the bid by promising to start operations soonest with our 3,000 Filipino stevedores and an array of Filipino, Singaporean, and English port executives, backed by our multi-million-dollar bid bonds and performance bonds following stiff international competition.

After a few weeks our ship, the largest pre-war luxury liner, renamed the Villa Magna by the Greeks, docked in Piraeus, Greece. Without engine, it was towed by giant tugboats we hired from the Netherlands, through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea to our cheering employees, 3,000 stevedores from the Philippines, to our port of destination, Jeddah.

The project was so successful that the Saudi government awarded to us without further bidding our second port, the Port of Jubail in the Persian Gulf or Arab Gulf to the Arabs, on the other side of the peninsula.

After our successful projects in Jeddah and Jubail, smaller O&M projects in Gizan also off the Arab desert, housing projects in Kuwait, smaller projects in Iraq’s Basrah and Baghdad, we ended our Arab journey after striking oil in Ajman, the United Arab Emirates, where we – Basic Energy and Landoil – brought our own oil rig which we leased from Andres Soriano’s PODCO in the Philippines.

Drilling was supervised by the late experienced Mario Nieto of Isabela whom we engaged as drilling superintendent. The drilling location was chosen by our Dr. Fran Gidson, the celebrated American who helped discover in earlier days the giant oil field in Iraq and a celebrated geologist.

We organized the drilling and raised drilling funds from our Arab friends and our subscribers from the Philippines and we had a substantial oil strike in Ajman, one of the smallest Emirates in the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, whose most popular centers are Dubai and the capital Abu Dhabi. Overall we have today perhaps more than two million Filipinos in the Arab world since our pioneering days from the mid-1970s to the 80s.

Our successful ventures in the Arab world came to a close with the Iran-Iraq war as we had to close shop with significant losses and then we had to come home to return to our old love, run for public office in the Philippines, after the end of Martial Law.

Last week, as we boarded the plane in Qatar, we envisioned going back to the Middle East and talk to the rulers of Ajman and the UAE about perhaps allowing us to redrill our old well there and add new wells to establish our oilfield, beginning with the first oil well we drilled there. This may be difficult to accomplish now but who knows. We are still active with Basic Energy in the Philippines with brother Oscar and nephew Carey de Venecia and son Joey III. They have small projects in Myanmar, Thailand, and Japan with major Thai partners.

We do not know how to go about it now, but after almost 40 years, we could inquire and try.

For our return home from France, instead of flying to London from Paris to catch the direct Philippine Airlines London-Manila non-stop flight, we decided to take the return flight home via the Arab route, in Qatar along the Persian Gulf – Arab Gulf to the Arabs – despite the dangerous tensions in the Gulf region. The week before, rockets destroyed some of Saudi Arabia’s richest oil fields, hit by missiles from Yemen or Iraq but suspected by Saudis as fired from Iran.

There will be many charges and counter-charges from both sides of the Gulf. Last week there were missed opportunities for US President Donald Trump and Iran President Hassan Rouhani to meet at the UN General Assembly.

We believe the UN secretary general and the president of France or chancellor of Germany could take the lead in initiating negotiations, with, say, Asian counterparts from India, Japan, or ASEAN, to restrain the Iranians, the Saudis, and the US to help put an end to the crisis in the Gulf which threatens more than 50% of the world’s petroleum supply, including the bulk of Philippines’ oil imports.

The Catholics and Protestants of Europe, after decades of conflict and bloodshed, have long reconciled and now live in peace. The Sunnis led by Saudi Arabia and the Shiites led by Iran, both followers of Islam, should likewise reconcile, keep their beliefs, until in God’s chosen time, like the Catholics and Protestants, reconcile, and unite as one family under God.

The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, an ASEAN leader-designate, a Chinese or Russian representative, should get-together and journey to Tehran and Riyadh to set a sustained peace process in motion until the work is done.