MANILA: Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said yesterday that she will work to improve the living conditions of the poor during her second year in office.
The workers "will serve as our inspiration," Arroyo said after attending Mass at the Edsa Shrine in Metro Manila.
The church service was held in honour of the first anniversary of the People Power uprising that swept her to power yesterday, in place of corruption-tainted Joseph Estrada.
Arroyo said Manila Archbishop Cardinal Jaime Sin, a key player in the two uprisings, is correct when saying "our policies should be directed at the poor, not merely as charity."
"We should spend time with them and listen to them," she said. After the Mass, Arroyo visited several poor communities in the capital.
Also yesterday, more than 2,000 members of the militant group Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, or the New Alliance of Patriots, gathered at Mendiola Bridge near the presidential palace to pressure Arroyo to live up to the promise she made after she assumed presidency.
The group said the rally was a re-enactment of the historic march last year that compelled the disgraced former president Estrada to leave the presidential palace.
Church officials earlier banned political rallies at the Edsa Shrine.
Anti-riot policemen with shields and truncheons buttressed a barbed wire barricade that separated the marchers from the road leading to the palace.
Satur Ocampo, a member of the House of Representative from the leftist party of Bayan Muna, or Nation First, said they are not asking for Arroyo's resignation but are instead demanding that she fulfill the objectives of justice and reforms.
In another development, a second batch of US soldiers flew into the Philippines yesterday on an anti-terrorist mission that local opposition groups warned could turn the country into another Afghanistan.
Two dozen American servicemen flew from Okinawa, Japan, to Zamboanga in the southern Philippines, bringing to nearly 50 the number of US troops now in the country to train local soldiers fighting Muslim guerrillas linked to Osama bin Laden.
The latest group, flown in by three US military transport aircrafts, carried a variety of communications and heavy equipment in a camouflaged cargo container.
(China Daily January 21, 2002)
