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T. Walsh: Address to Summit 2022, Session I
Written by Dr. Thomas G. Walsh, chairman, UPF International
Thursday, August 11, 2022
Address to Summit 2022 and Leadership Conference,
Seoul, Korea, August 11-15, 2022
It is my honor to serve as the chairman of the Universal Peace Federation and a pleasure to see many of you whom I’ve met previously on various occasions. I’m delighted you’re here, despite the ongoing COVID challenges. When you’re not speaking at the podium, please wear your mask. They’re quite strict about it here in Korea. Particularly inside the hotel we’re expected to wear them at all times.
I will give an orientation to our program. This Summit follows on the World Summit 2022 that took place in February of this year. That was a major global conference that resulted in a resolution called the Seoul Resolution related to the unification of the Korean peninsula, one of the major objectives and concerns of Father and Mother Moon over many decades. The leaders who came to that conference were focused on bringing peace and reconciliation, and eventually a reunification of the Korean peninsula.
We had representatives from 157 nations that had diplomatic ties with either South Korea or North Korea, so it wouldn’t only be a dialogue between South and North, say, which is difficult, but we could also operate at the periphery with many other countries.
For example, one of the co-chairs of that conference was the prime minister of Cambodia, H.E. Samdech Hun Sen. Cambodia has diplomatic relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. That’s significant because they are trying to find an opening for dialogue between North and South. We’re trying to work with a wide variety of nations.
The Seoul Resolution was signed by the prime minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen, and H.E. Ban Ki-moon, who is the former secretary-general of the UN and worked closely with us on that conference. Mother Moon signed that resolution, which called for building one peninsula, one people, one culture toward one nation, eventually a unified nation of people of one culture.
We are building on that resolution and tomorrow you will hear about a peace charter that we’re developing, which will be an outgrowth of the Seoul Resolution, which was primarily focused on the Korean peninsula. The Peace Charter tries to take this effort for peace on the Korean peninsula to a broader, global level. You might envision it as trying to solve what some could call a new cold war, where it’s not a divided peninsula, but you could say a divided world. How do we reconcile that divided world, where you have one planet, one humanity and one global culture of peace?
In addition, since the World Summit in February Dr. Yun Young-ho, Dr. Katherine Rigney and Rev. Bakari Camara and others have been working closely with leaders in Africa, particularly in Senegal, Niger and South Africa. In Senegal, where we had a summit in 2018, the President, Macky Sall, is now chairman of the African Union, so we’ve been dialoguing about doing a summit in collaboration with the African Union.
We also convened a summit in Niamey, Niger when the African Union was convening there in 2019, and signed an MOU. We’ve been following up with Niger. The former prime minister of Niger, who was prime minister at that time, is now the executive secretary of a group of 29 nations called CEN-SAD, which is an acronym standing for the Community of Nations of the Sahel and the Sahara. This means nations of North Africa near the Mediterranean, many of which are Arabic-speaking, and then nations just south of that, before you get to Central Africa. Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Sudan are among those nations.
H.E. Brigi Rafini, the executive secretary of CEN-SAD, will be with us, and a group of about 25 ministers of youth and education from CEN-SAD nations will be here. That will be an important part of this conference.
Another delegation, also from Africa, is a group of prominent religious leaders, and I will be able to introduce one of them to you, Prophet Radebe. Dr. Radebe is a leading figure in Africa in the area of African spirituality, and has literally millions of followers. We saw it firsthand in Johannesburg when we had a wonderful family celebration there under his leadership, with literally hundreds of thousands gathered and millions observing online.
There is a religious delegation from Africa attending the Interreligious Association for Peace and Development (IAPD) assembly. They are working on a proposal to the African Union to consider creating an interreligious council, an associated entity that could work within the framework of the African Union in a complementary relationship with the governments of the member states of the African Union. This is a bold and exciting initiative, where the faith leaders would partner with the government leaders. We will see many of the delegates of the Interreligious Association for Peace and Development from Africa and they will have some of their own consultations while they are here, as will the CEN-SAD representatives.
We also have a strong delegation here from the United States, which has a long history with this country of Korea, and was the central nation to defend South Korea during the Korean war. That relationship has continued to be important. That delegation is currently going around visiting officials of the Korean government—the defense department here in Korea, the diplomatic corps, the ministry of foreign affairs—and getting updated on the current situation on this peninsula, which I think you know is a pretty hot place in terms of it being a flashpoint globally. We’re in a complicated region, not far from Taiwan, which is also a flashpoint, but the Korean peninsula has always been very much so.
A fourth important delegation is the Asian Vision Institute based in Cambodia, guided by Prime Minister Hun Sen, whom we are working closely with in another bold initiative for the development of the Asia Pacific Union.
Another aspect will be a session dedicated to discussion of threats to religious freedom that are taking place globally in many countries. To some extent we’re seeing a certain decline in some of the liberal democratic traditions that emphasized religious freedom, and some nations are starting to be more excluding toward minority religions or religions that are not the mainstream in that country. It’s a threat even to major religions who may be the dominant religion in one country, but their followers in another country are a persecuted minority.
It’s a major issue and we’ll be addressing that. Even the movement of Father and Mother Moon has faced its own share of challenges from those that misunderstand or misrepresent our movement.
Finally, we’re here for another important reason, and it’s the behind-the-scenes reason of why we gathered at this time. This is the 10th anniversary of the passing of Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon, the co-founder of UPF and the founder of Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. To many of you who were working with us more than 10 years ago, you knew him and worked with him and listened to his speeches. We all love him and miss him, Mother Moon most of all, and so she wanted to convene, as they always did on important occasions in their lives, major programs not just to celebrate but to do work for the sake of peace. The occasion this time is the 10th anniversary of Father Moon’s passing.
Thank you.
To go to the World Summit 2022 Schedule page, click here.