District Adopts a Seoul Sister
S. Korean Capital Becomes 10th City to Unite With D.C. in Partnership Program

By Lori Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 28, 2006

The mayor of Seoul, Lee Myung-Bak, is a Christian. Which turned out to be a lucky thing when Lee paid a visit to the John A. Wilson Building to sign an agreement to join Seoul and Washington in sister city marriage.

Lee and D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) had just toasted each other with flutes of sparkling cider and sliced a three-tiered cake decorated with white icing, pink flowers and tiny paper flags representing the United States and South Korea. ("This really is like a wedding," Williams observed.) Suddenly, amid the applause, a white-haired man approached, laid hands on the mayoral foreheads and began to pray.

The man, Ray Bringham, the California founder of an international prayer summit, was not on the guest list. Startled city officials quickly led him away.

But Lee and Williams seemed unfazed by the impromptu blessing.

"Fortunately," said acting Secretary of the District Patricia Elwood. "Otherwise we wouldn't have gotten the sister city relationship off to a very good start."

With the ceremony March 13, Seoul became the District's 10th sister city and the latest conquest in the Williams administration's campaign to firmly imprint the nation's capital on the global imagination. Since Williams took office in 1999, he has signed seven sister city agreements, including pacts with Paris, Athens, Brussels and Brazzaville in the Congo Republic. Williams has scheduled visits to several previously designated partners, including Bangkok, Beijing and, later this year, Dakar, Senegal.

"We've got many countries that want to be sister cities with us," said Elwood, whose office oversees the program. "Chicago has 25 sister cities. So we really are way behind the eight ball on this."

During the ceremony with Lee, Williams acknowledged to a crowd of more than 100 Korean-American business executives that he's "not a big expert" on the sister city program. "There's a whole lot of nomenclature about what sister cities are. I don't know about all that," he said.

But the mayor is a student of the historical importance of cities, and he speaks frequently about their growing influence on world politics and trade, and of their power, "at their finest, to represent what a livable community can be." Direct cooperation among cities generates trade, tourism, technological innovation and understanding of other cultures, he said.

"That's why sister city relationships are so important," Williams told the crowd earlier this month. "And that's why we're so excited about developing a sister city relationship with Seoul."

In July, Williams will co-chair the 50th anniversary celebration of Sister Cities International, the Washington-based nonprofit group that promotes sister partnerships between U.S. and foreign jurisdictions. Since it was founded in 1956 after President Dwight D. Eisenhower convened a White House summit on citizen diplomacy, the organization has matched more than 700 U.S. communities with more than 2,200 communities in 132 countries worldwide.

Executive Director Tim Honey said the network has been critical to rebuilding ties after wars and other conflicts. For example, he said, reconciliation with Germany and Japan was a huge issue after World War II. To this day, the largest number of sister partnerships is maintained with Japanese communities, Honey said, including a pact between Riverside, Calif., and Sendai, Japan, that will be 50 years old next year.

After the Vietnam War, "San Francisco reached out to Saigon before we even established diplomatic relations," Honey said, paving the way for the first direct flight to Ho Chi Minh City from San Francisco International Airport. More recently, the Denver Regional Council of Governments paired with the province of Baghdad to provide humanitarian aid to Iraq as well as expose Iraqi officials to systems of government, education, business and nonprofit groups in the United States.

"Certainly, the time we're in right now is in desperate need for people to come together and create a foundation for peace," Honey said. "And that was the vision that Eisenhower had for people-to-people diplomacy."

Honey praised Williams for becoming more involved in the sister city program. "D.C. is not where Chicago is. But Mayor Williams has clearly placed a real emphasis on reaching out and being more engaged," he said. "The thing with Seoul, for example, wasn't just two mayors coming together and shaking hands. A lot of citizens were there."

In fact, the D.C.-Seoul pact was initiated by leaders of the local Korean community, who count more than 200,000 residents of Korean heritage in the Washington region.

"You can get a very nice cultural and economic and political relationship" through the sister program, said the Rev. Sang Jin Choi, executive director of Action for Peace Through Prayer and Aid, a ministry to the homeless in the District's Truxton Circle neighborhood.

"Also, many Korean people are so interested in America as a democratic model country, so they want to have opportunities to get internships and economic relationships and anything."

Lee, the Seoul mayor and a leading presidential candidate in South Korea, said he hopes a sister relationship with Washington will produce closer ties between his country and the United States.

"In the 21st century, it will increasingly be the trend that cooperation between cities will become just as important as cooperation on the national level. And I think there is increasing interest from U.S. governors and U.S. mayors in these kinds of relationships," Lee said.

"Over the long term, it will lead to better understanding between the two people, Koreans and Americans. And so it will be a big benefit for all of us."