Non-Aligned Movement summit kicks off in Tehran

PanARMENIAN.Net - A two-day Non-Aligned Movement summit opened in Tehran on Thursday, gathering the heads of state or government and senior officials from 120 nations, AFP reports.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was to address the delegations along with Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who was handing the rotating NAM presidency over to Iran.

State television showed the summit venue, located in a heavily secured district in northern Tehran, packed with representatives from much of the developing world.

Leaders included the presidents of Afghanistan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Sudan, Zimbabwe and the Palestinian Authority, and the emir of Qatar.

The prime ministers of India, Iraq and Syria were also present.

President Asif Ali Zardari is representing Pakistan at the summit where he would present Pakistan’s vision for a new and reinvigorated NAM, besides holding bilateral meetings with leaders of Iran and India.

North Korea was represented by its ceremonial head of state, parliamentary president Kim Yong-Nam, rather than the country's leader Kim Jong-Un.

In all, 29 of the 120 nations in the NAM meeting were represented by heads of state or government. The other three-quarters were represented by senior officials: vice presidents, deputy prime ministers, foreign ministers and envoys.

The leaders of some countries who had been expected by Iran to show up for the summit - Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Ghana and Kuwait - did not make it for the opening.

The NAM, born at the height of the Cold War, started out as a group of nations seeing themselves as independent of the two power blocs centered on Washington and Moscow.

Since then, it has become a vehicle for championing the interests of developing states, calling for UN reform to limit the powers of the UN Security Council, promoting a Palestinian state, and condemning Western sanctions on some of its members, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Zimbabwe.