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Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,
it’s nice to see you all. I am very happy to be
with you tonight and thank you very much for
inviting me to be your Guest of Honour
As you know this 40th anniversary is a special
occasion all over South East Asia.
In fact, we were talking about it last week at
our ASEAN Ministers meeting in Manila, and we
want to make it a very special occasion.
Because after all we are celebrating forty years
that have totally changed our region.
That’s a long time, of course but the older ones
among us can remember 1967 very clearly and all
the problems in our region.
Yet now forty years later we are united we
represent 500 million people and all of them
share respect for each other warm friendship and
a common purpose.
That is quite an achievement so, there’s a lot
to celebrate especially when we remember how it
started.
That goes back exactly forty years ago today to
Bangkok when our five founding fathers made a
historic declaration.
It was a very simple document, it had just five
articles but for the first time they made
Southeast Asia an association of nations and
that is what we are celebrating tonight.
One of these articles was beautifully expressed.
It stated that the aim of ASEAN was to “secure
for their peoples and for posterity, the
blessings of peace, freedom and prosperity.”
As I said beautiful words beautifully expressed
and maybe we should get our children to learn
them off by heart.
The words may have been written a long time ago,
but they mean a lot to us now because we are
that posterity and we are receiving those
blessings.
So let’s thank them for their vision and let’s
be happy that it has grown and is shared by all
of South East Asia.
If the founding father were with us I am sure
they would be very pleased to see us tonight
with friends from all over the world who have
helped us realize their hopes.
And with that, ladies and gentlemen we have a
wonderful past to celebrate and an exciting
future to look forward to.
But tonight is for the present and we have good
food, good entertainment and good company to
share.
So, I wish you all a very happy evening. Thank
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