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Non-Aligned Movement Summit – big focus on Iran nuclear issue

A total of 29 heads of state or government are attending the Teheran summit, including those of Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority, Sudan, Qatar and Zimbabwe.

Iran nuclear issue, Syria dominate tense Teheran summit, Khaleej Times, (AFP) / 30 August 2012 Iran’s showdown with the UN Security Council over its nuclear activities, and clashing speeches over the bloody conflict shaking Syria dominated the opening of a summit in Teheran on Thursday.
Those issues swept aside the veneer of diplomatic harmony Iran had been trying to project over the gathering of 120 members of the Non-Aligned Movement and left several leaders squirming in their seats.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei opened the session with a speech in which he insisted his country ‘is never seeking nuclear weapons’ and accusing the UN Security Council of exerting an ‘overt dictatorship’ under the sway of its Western permanent members, the
United States, Britain and France.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon, who looked irritated during the speech, shot back in his own address that Iran should build confidence in its nuclear programme by ‘fully complying with the relevant (UN) Security Council resolutions and thoroughly cooperating with the IAEA’ — the
UN’s nuclear watchdog.

Otherwise, he warned, ‘a war of words can quickly spiral into a war of
violence.’……

The summit to-and-fro over Iran’s nuclear ambitions had its roots in
an unusually frank meeting Ban held with Khamenei and Ahmadinejad
after arriving on Wednesday.

In those separate talks, Ban told them Iran needed to provide
‘concrete’ steps to ease the international showdown which has raised
the spectre of airstrikes on nuclear facilities, threatened by both
Israel and the United States as an option.

Tensions have been raised by the International Atomic Energy Agency
unveiling a new Iran ‘task force’ to scrutinise Teheran’s nuclear
programme and its compliance with UN resolutions.

Additionally, the latest IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear progress was
expected to be released this week — possibly even during the two-day
Teheran summit.

The report is said to highlight expanded enrichment in Iran and
suspicions concerning an off-limits military base in Parchin, outside
Teheran, where warhead design experiments might have taken place.

Ban had been criticised by the United States and Israel for attending
the Teheran summit. But before heading to Iran, he promised he would
raise the sensitive issues of the nuclear programme, human rights and
Syria.

He made good on that promise, and also took Iran’s leaders to task for
recent comments calling Israel a ‘cancerous tumour’ that should be cut
out of the Middle East, while telling both Iran and Israel to cool the
bellicose language….
A total of 29 heads of state or government are attending the Teheran
summit, including those of Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Lebanon,
Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority, Sudan, Qatar and Zimbabwe. North
Korea was represented by its ceremonial head of state, parliamentary
president Kim Yong-Nam, rather than the country’s leader Kim Jong-Un.
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display-1.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2012/August/middleeast_August443.xml&section=middleeast

August 31, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | MIDDLE EAST, politics international