HAVANA, Sept 16: Developing countries broached sensitive nuclear issues in Havana on Saturday as North Korea blamed the United States for prodding it to have deterrent arms.
At the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit, North Korea charged that the United States left it no option but to secure deterrent nuclear weapons, and pledged that as long as it was hit by US sanctions it would not be back in six-party talks.
“Our country will never return to the talks under US sanctions,” Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly, told NAM leaders and delegates.
“The United States, far from complying with the six-party commission’s agreements, has continued to impose unilateral sanctions sending the talks to a standstill and dragging the situation into an unpredictable point,” he charged.
Complaining that Washington was threatening Pyongyang with all sorts of manoeuvres, he said: “(North) Korea has had no other option than to have nuclear arms as a deterrent weapon, since Korea does not need nuclear arms.”
“(North) Korea has nuclear arms as a deterrent to firmly guarantee the peace and security of the Korean peninsula and the region.”
NAM heads of state and government from more than 55 countries and delegates from a total of 118 were due to adopt a voluminous final declaration backing Iran’s right to nuclear energy; urging UN reform to achieve greater weight for poor countries; and opposing what they see as US interventionism.
The proposed document also condemns Israel’s unlawful policies in the Palestinian territories and its recent military intervention in Lebanon.
On Friday, leaders of Non-Aligned Movement countries met without Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
“Doctors insisted that he continues his rest,” Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said at the opening of the summit, adding that Mr Castro’s brother Raul would represent Cuba at the gathering.
“Once he is fully capable of resuming his duties, Fidel (Castro) will be the chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement,” Perez Roque said.
Among the prominent leaders speaking at the two-day summit was Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who insisted Tehran’s atomic program had strictly peaceful objectives, and claimed the United States was the real nuclear threat.
He urged his counterparts to help ‘counter attempts to prevent Iran from developing its peaceful nuclear activity’.
Raul Castro, and Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, also delivered harsh condemnations of US policies, while Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for ‘moderation, harmony and reason’.—AFP
