Neric Acosta MP – Secretary General CALD

Bonjour. Asalaam Alaikum. Good morning.

Lord Alderdice, Mohamed Abied, our colleagues in the Union Constitutionnelle for the gracious hosting and warm hospitality and to Jasper Veen and the LI Secretariat for putting this all together so magnificently.

On behalf of the CALD and its Chair, the Hon Senator FMD, former President of the Philippine Senate and the LP, it gives me great honor to speak before you today.

As CALD did in Ottawa, Dakar, Sofia and today, Marrakech, CALD takes great pride in affirming our ties with the LI and draws much inspiration from the networks forged and friendships nurtured over the years, and across continents. The growth and spread of liberal ideals- manifest in our largest attendance from Asia to date, including the presence of Dr. Sein Win, Prime Minister-in exile of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, and having BiKim Hsio reelected as LI VP and the only woman and Asian in the Bureau, and holding the first CALD ExeCom outside Asia, as well as the formation of many new regional networks and organizations- have been nothing short of dynamic and phenomenal. Our CALDALDE historic meeting in April this year in the Philippines, graced by former President Corazon Aquino, herself an LI Freedom Prize Laureate, and the bonding of LERIAL-CALD today built from initial talks in Sofia, only point to the fact that our horizons have expanded and our common efforts and vision have, as our new LI logo depicts, taken to confident flight.

This year’s conference has offered us many useful metaphors to serve as conceptual and practical guideposts. Lord Alderdice presented us with a portrait of a ‘permanent conference table’- of the primacy of dialogue and the search for convergence, where we are able to bring our ideas, frustrations, and hopes into sharper deliberation and meaningful discussion.

Graham Watson spoke of a ‘drawbridge’ that if allowed to be laid down, not pulled up, opens vast possibilities for change and new energy in myriad dimensions and fields- politics, the economy, arts, technology, trade, migration, the environment.

In CALD (and its video) we have used the symbol of the Oriental fan- each strip, each facet representing a distinct culture and experience, but brought together at a base from whence, when opened, serves its function of utility and unity. A fan that opens new vistas of cooperation and partnership- fanning flames of freedom, hope and change.

The metaphors underline our commitment to democracy, human rights, the rule of law, liberty. These are high-minded, ennobling standards we believe in and live by. Yet for those of us who are citizens of the largest and most populous continent on earth, where over half of its peoples continue to live in abject poverty, these ideals may simply be abstractions.

For the ordinary Asian, many these ideals are only made real and given flesh with narratives of sacrifice, with sagas of struggle, with stories of pain and difficulty and paying a high price for a principle. Ninoy Aquino, Aung Sang Suu Kyi, Kim Dae Jung- and for us in CALD, our friends Chen Shui Bian, Chee Soon Juan, Martin Lee. And, of course, this year’s Freedom Prize honoree, Sam Rainsy, who at a time when he was stripped of his parliamentary immunity by the Hun Sen government made full use of the CALD headquarters in Manila as his ‘safe harbor,’ following CALD Chair Senator Drilon’s active intercessions on Rainsy’s behalf in the IPU’s Human Rights Committee chaired by the Senator Drilon.

Beyond the heroism and strength of these remarkable individuals whom we hold in the highest esteem, however, liberal democracy as we know is lived in the more simple interconnections we build, the inchoate networks we forge and allow to evolve, the friendships we nurture and deepen. Ottawa, Dakar, Sofia, Marrakech and many other venues of exchange and cooperation symbolize more than just locations of LI Congresses. They represent the affirmation of our higher purpose of changing the world, the more audacious dream of making the world more Liberal in the truest sense of free dialogue, free expression, understanding, openness, responsibility. These gatherings of ours therefore represent, perhaps more importantly, the commitments we take to face up to the difficult choices we have to make as Liberals in our own contexts- and the challenges we need to tackle with sacrifice and responsibility for our constituencies and communities.

That is why beyond the well-deserved celebration of our triumphs and gains as Liberals worldwide, it becomes more pressing and crucial that we are ever mindful of the dilemmas and challenges that face us in a world of dizzying change and damning contradictions. As Liberals, true to ourselves and our ideals, we must face the harsher questions that bedevil us and place disquieting predicaments in our way.

In Asia as in many other areas of the world, the spread of democracy is threatened by the insidious reach of illiberal democracy, an alarming phenomenon of ‘elected autocrats’ who use and manipulate the elections and democratic rule to consolidate more authoritarian control of the body politic, damaging democratic institutions in the process. Thaksin of Thailand, Arroyo of the Philippines, Chavez of Venezuela have been known to subvert institutions for sheer political control and use the levers of power to engender not ‘informed choices’ of a largely impoverished electorate, but ‘manipulated choices’ of those who in their destitution fall prey to the ills of patronage and money-dominated practices.

The arena of economic cooperation and trade, highly contentious as it is for many countries, challenge us Liberals to revisit our own beliefs vis-a-vis the policies we may support or tolerate. Free markets, free trade- letting the metaphorical drawbridge down — is a mantra for the Liberal, but for many of the poorer countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the nagging, uncomfortable question remains: how free is free when food tariffs and agricultural subsidies in developed countries continue to disadvantage, if not further impoverish, sectors of farmers and consumers everywhere? Trade talks in Doha, Cancun or Hong Kong over the last few years faced rough sailing over ideological divides just as much as they did over the more basic affective, emotional issues of fairness and justice.

In the same vein it is asked: in a world so globalized in the ‘drawbridge-down’ movement of goods and services, why is the movement of people across boundaries actually becoming, for all intents and purposes, more restrictive? In a time defined by the threats of terrorism and increasing conflict in many of the hotspots of the world, do we see people on the move as real, living individuals with their birthright to freedom, dignity, opportunity and hope, beyond their utility as migrant workers taking jobs in sectors that their hosts countries’ could not fill? I beg your indulgence if I must read, as I think it fitting, George Orwell who poignantly, if disturbingly, offered, when writing about Marrakech in 1939 that:

‘all people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important work that they do, the less visible they are. Still a white skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing the field, you probably give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances are that you don’t even see him. I have noticed this time and again. In a tropical landscape one’s eyes takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant at his hoe patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less to look at.’

Parenthetically, as Tetsundo Iwakuni rightly reminds us, Liberals enshrine the inherent dignity and value of the human person, and that in education particularly, we must move away from viewing people as ‘human capital’ or commodities for labor markets and instead uphold goals of teaching wisdom and instilling human values.

Against a backdrop of rapid inter-migrations and beyond our lofty affirmations of intercultural and interfaith understanding and dialogue, how far, indeednotwithstanding the metaphorical ‘permanent conference table’ — are we prepared to embrace diversity in its all its complexities? The public debate yet again spawned over the use of the ‘hijab’ or the veil in multicultural societies like London or Paris (drawing no less than British Foreign Minister Jack Straw in the fray) challenges us to Liberals to question where we stand on these unsettling, nettlesome issues and what policies we ought to craft or pursue in this respect. Whose definitions of diversity and inter-cultural understanding prevail, or do we use, in these discourses?

It is in this nexus of challenges that we need to configure our networking and programs of action as Liberals– in CALD, RELIAL, ALDE, ALN, ALMENA, INLW, IFLRY, the larger LI family. Because our best strength as Liberals is found and reinforced not so much in our successes but in our inherent capacity to question ourselves truthfully –so as to anchor our ideals, as what another LI Freedom Prize recipient Vaclav Havel says, in the moral ascendancy of our argument and the moral force of our actions. Perhaps only then can we say that as Liberals against the socalled ‘confusion of the Left and the rigidity of the right’– given the contesting forces of fundamentalism, extremism, anarchism, virulent nationalism, reactive socialism borne out the deficits in democracy, development and dignity Mr Sundeep Waslekar underscored today- we proudly rise or have risen to the occasion of providing honest alternatives to remake and reshape a truly more democratic and unabashedly enlightened, responsible Liberal world order. Only then can we be truly the ‘only show in town’ (again, Graham Watson’s words) and embrace and live the fullest meaning of the conference tables of dialogue, the drawbridges of hope, the fans of freedom- in Asia as with the rest of the our world.

VIVE LA FAMILLE LIBERALE! Merci Beaucoup. Shukran. Assalumu Alaikum. And as we say in the Philippines, MABUHAY ANG DEMOKRASYA AT KALAYAANG LIBERAL. Long live LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM!