Make family, not war: Int'l peace campaigner
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The national family planning agency may not like it, but a controversial international peace activist has said that the way to achieve peace is through propagation.
Addressing an inaugural peace convocation in Jakarta on Friday evening, North Korean peace activist Rev. Sun Myung Moon said that aside from loving your enemies, a family lineage was very essential in pursuing peace.
"Without a lineage, neither life nor love can endure. Lineage is the bridge allowing the parents' spirit to carry on through subsequent generations," Moon, 86, said through an interpreter.
Moreover, another way to achieve and promote peace is through an "exchange marriage" with someone from another race, nationality or religion, he asserted.
Rev. Moon began his public ministry in Pyongyang after the end of World War II, despite suppression of religion.
Moon gained quite a large number of followers in the North Korean capital, although he was tortured by the Communist authorities.
He survived however, and formally began the Unification Church (The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity) in Korea. It has now many branches in around 40 countries and centers in more than 120 cities across the United States.
Rev. Moon also travels around the world to promote peace.
He founded the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (IIFWP) in 1999. Moon established the Universal Peace Federation in September 2005 as a global alliance of religious, academic, political and civic leaders, as well as organizations to join forces to promote peace.
The peace federation provides a mechanism for joint peace- building efforts among government, religious, cultural, education and civil society representatives.
Former Indonesian president Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid, himself a noted pluralist Muslim cleric, said that people can learn a lot from Moon's very long struggle for peace.
"People use religion in a wrong way. They tend to fight other people," Gus Dur, who formerly chaired the country's largest Muslim organization -- Nahdlatul Ulama, told the audience.
Moon said that the peace federation's role was like the United Nations in the past; it served as a peace police and peace army to safeguard global peace.
"The United Nations has made important contributions for peace. But on its 60th anniversary, it has yet to discover the way to fulfill its founding goals."
Critics of the Unification Church and Rev. Moon have accused Moon of brainwashing young recruits, fleecing his flock to line his own pockets, and making a mockery of the institution of marriage by organizing arranged mass marriages.