This year’s
Venezuelan Week in Malaysia, which celebrates its eleventh edition, coincides
with a significant fact for us: it has been thirty years since the
establishment of diplomatic relations between Venezuela and Malaysia. Three
decades of meeting, of coincidences, mutual support, search for opportunities,
exchanges, knowledge, promotion, highlighting the ties that unites us. Thirty
years of friendship.
What has
been achieved in this time is not small.
Slowly, but consistently, trade has increased. Many Malaysian vehicles
travel on streets and avenues paved with Venezuelan crude oil. Many Venezuelans
have computer components that were made in Malaysia. Music, dance, food,
photography, painting and Venezuelan cinema have brought to these lands our way
of understanding life; they have provided a fairly complete example of the
cultural wealth of the country. Mutual political support in the various
multilateral organisations, such as the United Nations, underscore the fact that
we share much the same views when it comes to international politics. Two young
countries, proud of their independent status, fighting for a new international
order based on peace, cooperation and respect for sovereignty. Diplomatic
relations between Venezuela and Malaysia have passed without serious problems
or discrepancies. On the contrary, it
has been a positive relationship from all points of view.
But as we
look forward, we note that there is much greater potential to be gained from
this relationship; we have past and present, but above all, we have a future.
We are pleased with our progress in these thirty years, safe in the knowledge
that when the time comes, we will celebrate sixty years of diplomatic relations
with a longer list of achievements, which will be more significant.
This
eleventh Venezuelan week in Malaysia celebrates friendship with the 31 strings
of the harp that has marked Venezuelan musician Leonard Jácome’s career and
life, and who will be performing in the hall of the Malaysian Philharmonic
Orchestra at Petronas Twin Towers. It
will find rich company in the gastronomic art of chef Tamara Rodríguez, in the
first Venezuelan novel translated into Bahasa Malaysia, ‘Doña Bárbara’, and in
a new edition of the Simón Bolívar lectures, among other activities. Well,
here's the program. Here is a renewed sign of our commitment to reinforce good
relations between Venezuela and Malaysia.
Manuel
Guzmán, Ambassador of Venezuela to Malaysia
