How Ka Blas beat the rising crescendo

PARIS – You’ve got to credit our Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople for aplomb, self-confidence and chutzpah.

In last Wednesday’s session of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in its auditorium on Avenue de Fortenoy, Blas – true to his name as Kulog ng Hagonoy – literally beat the music.

Here’s how it happened: Fourteen speakers, most of them foreign ministers and education ministers of different member-countries, had been scheduled to speak. Owing to time constraints, each of the speakers was allotted a maximum of only eight minutes.

There was a timeclock ticking away each minute to remind who was at the podium of the passing of time. The signal to end one’s message and "sign off" was the sound of the opening bars of a piece of classical music. Secretary Ople ploughed through his written speech with characteristic gusto, plus a cough or two. Alas, time ran out when he was only halfway through, and the music started playing – softly at first. Instead of wrapping up his address, Ka Blas simply went on determined to finish his prepared text. The music grew louder and louder, but so did Ople’s stentorian voice. By the time he completed his 16-minute speech, the music was thundering like the Warsaw Concerto.

Without a twinge of nervousness or any apologetic or embarrassed frown on his countenance, our Foreign Secretary then crossed the stage to solemnly shake hands with the bemused UNESCO) Secretary-General, Koichiro Matsuura. (I’m not sure the rest of the audience were equally amused, but the UNESCO way, I’m told, is for delegates to snore through speeches.)

At the dinner tendered that night in his honor by Philippine Ambassador Hector Villarroel in his elegant fifth-floor apartment on the posh Avenue Foch (near the Etoile), Marinduque Rep. Edmundo Reyes, Jr. offered a toast to Ka Blass for his having accomplished the feat of delivering a full address "to the accompaniment of music".

I must say that Blas’s energy is simply amazing. Yesterday, he took off from Roissy on a Singapore Airlines flight enroute to Bali, Indonesia – gee whiz, all the way from Paris – to attend the pre-Summit meeting of Foreign Ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The President is going there, too, in the next few days, before even recovering from her jet lag.

What will be discussed at the Bali meeting, Blas told me the other night, will be ASEAN security cooperation and free market ideas. They will also bring up anew the issue of Burma (Myanmar) releasing the pro-Democracy heroine, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, from prison – a longtime problem festering in ASEAN, which the generals in Yangon have stubbornly ignored.

Ka Blas has courageously been in the forefront of fighting for Suu Kyi’s freedom from arbitrary and cruel detention. But the Burmese generals, who rule with an iron hand, obviously fear the drawing power of her personal magnetism among their restive people. Aside from being the daughter of General Aung San, the national hero, she’s a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, renowned worldwide for her constancy and bravery.

The Indonesian government, too, is anxious that Aung San Suu Kyi be given back her freedom – but even such a prestigious personage as our friend, former Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas who went to Myanmar recently to meet with the ruling junta, was not permitted to visit Ms. Suu Kyi, either in the hospital (where she was recently operated) or in her prison cell north of Yangon.

The generals claim the heroine of the democracy movement is alive and well. We only have their tattered word (they’ve lied so often) that this is so.

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I’m sure much has been written about it already, but President GMA’s visit here was a successful one. Aside from keynoting the opening congress of UNESCO, she made a happy pilgrimage – as an Assumptionista – to the Assumption House here (near our Embassy, incidentally, in the 16th arrondissement) where she prayed at the altar of the Assumption order’s saintly foundress, Mother Marie Eugénie Milleret (1817-1898). She was accompanied, of course, by Sr. Luz Soriano of our own Assumption College, and Bro. Rolando Dizon, FSC.

Since we’ve already had two Presidents who came from Assumption (the other one was President Cory Cojuangco Aquino), and there, too, is Senator Loren Legarda, you might want to know that the House of the Religieuses de l’Assomption, which is the place from where all the Assumption schools were inspired, is located at No. 17, rue de l’Assomption, 75016 Paris.

What did GMA pray for at the shrine of the Mother Foundress? For her re-election?

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Afterwards, in the same House, she met with leaders of the Filipino community in Paris, led by their president, Lito Gomez, a computer "configurator" and businessman. Lito’s is a success story, literally from rags to riches. He arrived in Paris in freezing weather without a coat. But he was a handsome young fellow, and when a passing French lady saw him shivering on a Paris street corner (waiting for his Paris-based sister to arrive from out of town to fetch him), the lady took pity on him and gave him her coat!

Lito first went to work as a waiter, then parlayed his savings into a small distributionship, and today, with his grown-up son, Frank, and his wife, Rina, assisting him, has a thriving computer business. (He used to be co-owner of a restaurant, too, but gave that up a couple of years ago as too time-consuming.)

By the way, there are between 60,000 to 70,000 OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) and residents in France, but when I went to our Embassy at 4, Hameau de Boulainvilliers, 15116 Paris, last Wednesday to observe the final hours of registration for "absentee" voting next May, I learned that only 1,200 of them have registered. As usual, it was the typical Pinoy and Pinay last-minute rally – and the Embassy compound was thronged with eager registrants.

However, I heard, most of the Filipinos stayed away. First, since their papers were . . . well, somewhat in doubt, some feared their passports might be "confiscated". Most of the others took exception to the clause that stipulated that they "solemnly swear" to return to the Philippines within three years.

Why on earth our congressmen and senators inserted that self-defeating requirement is beyond comprehension – but that’s what our so-called solons do. They try to plug loopholes which don’t exist. Why such a requirement? You’ll notice that, as a result, around the world, few of our OFWs even tried to register, when they used to clamor for the right to cast their ballots.

If our congressmen and senators stopped conducting those endless "investigations" and inquests, perhaps they’d find time to think and enact sensible laws.