Iran-Iraq war and our work in M. East and N. Africa

In our previous column, we said we experienced up close some of the most devastating wars in the world.

- JOSE DE VENECIA JR.

The first was the Pacific War and the subsequent invasion of Manila by Japan in 1941 when we were five years old, and then the Vietnam War, when we served as a 29-year-old Minister and concurrent Economic and Press Counsellor at the Philippine Embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), then South Vietnam from 1966-1969.

We came into close contact with a disastrous war the third time in the 1980s, the Iran-Iraq war, as a pioneering businessman from the late 1970s until the early 1980s in the Middle East and North Africa — in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Iraq, Jordan, and Libya.

In Saudi Arabia, we operated the Port of Jeddah on the Red Sea and the Port of Jubail in the Persian Gulf as prime contractor in our role then as founding chairman of the Philippines-Singapore Ports Corporation. We also built a large-scale electrification network around the Riyadh central region; highways in Iraq; oil drilling in the Emirate of Ajman, the United Arab Emirates and hit commercial oil there with much joy, until the price of oil plunged from $39 per barrel to $8 per barrel in only a few months, and we had to abandon the well after much tears and wailing, and brought our oil rig and Filipino workforce home, indeed the first Filipino-led oil well abroad with foreign partners, mostly Arab.