INTRODUCTION
Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen:

For every country and every people, national day carries a very special significance. Our individual struggles for freedom and nationhood may vary in sacrifices and goals; but common to all of them is our peoples’ commitment to the values of freedom.

For this reason, I am especially grateful for your presence and your gracious participation in today’s celebration of the 98th anniversary of Philippine independence.

In another two years, we Filipinos shall commemorate the centenary of our independence — remembering with pride that the First Philippine Republic (inaugurated on 23 January 1899) was historically the first free republic founded by a colonial people in the whole of Asia, the Pacific, and Africa.
A TANGIBLE FREEDOM
In the Philippines, we speak of freedom not just in the abstract but especially in terms of a people’s will to live with dignity and in solidarity with all nations. We speak of freedom too in the sense of liberating the masses of Filipinos from the tyranny of poverty, which, to this day, still afflicts so many of us.

In this effort, we have joined our neighbors — in Southeast Asia and in the wider region of the Asia-pacific — in the search for political stability, economic prosperity and social equity for all our peoples. We have organized ourselves for cooperative action — through regional groupings such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN; and, most recently, the 18-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC.

As a result of this collective effort, we are beginning to recognize a regional — as well as a national — interest: interests we share with our friends and neighbors. Among these is the vision we have in common of an enduring peace and stability in our part of the world; of prosperity for all our peoples; of life together in mutual respect for each other’s dignity and independence.

These regional interests we have learned to take up as our own — as necessary to our national life in the new century the world is entering as the freedom our forefathers won for themselves 98 years ago.

Excellencies, friends:

As we celebrate the 98th anniversary of Philippine independence, we reaffirm our commitment to the values of freedom, human development, international friendship and peace as guaranteed by the United Nations Charter.

In this spirit, I invite you to raise your glasses with me in a toast to the common goal of our respective nations — to bestow these values on our peoples and upon future generations — and to our hope of achieving our dream of a stable peace and sustained development for our region and the world.

Mabuhay!