Cairo, July 15: Blasting nations and organisation supporting terror in any form, PM Manmohan Singh told Non-Aligned Movement summit on Wednesday that time had come for the world to unite against terrorism.
“Nations giving safe heavens to terrorists should be brought to justice, he said. Terror groups have become more sophisticated in these years. Terrorists don’t represent any cause group or religion”, he said addressing the 15th NAM Summit here.
Proposing a comprehensive convention on terrorism he said that “The infrastructure of terrorism must be dismantled and there should be no safe havens for terrorists because they do not represent any cause, group or religion. ”
The convention will bind countries to an internationally accepted defintion of terrorism and abide by a code of conduct in dealing with the issue of trans-border terrorism.
The PM’s emphatic stand against nations supporting terror comes on the day that Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan met to prepare ground for a meeting between their respective PMs on Thursday.
He added that “extremism, intolerance and terrorism are our antitheses; they seek to destroy us and our movement.”
Leaders from NAM countries, including India have assembled at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt with the agenda to hammer out a strategy to tackle the world financial crisis and seek international solidarity to fight terrorism and enhance peace and development.
‘Inclusivity needed’
Pressing for the inclusion of the developing world in multilateral bodies, the prime minister said: “Decision making processes, whether in the United Nations or the international financial institutions continue to be based on charters written more than 60 years ago, though the world has changed greatly since then.
“Developing countries,” he added, “must be fully represented in the decision making levels of international institutions if they are to remain effective…”
‘Relevance of NAM’
Recalling the first NAM summit of 1961, when one of the movement’s founding fathers and India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had spoken of the “moral force” of the grouping, Manmohan Singh said the words held true even today.
“History has shown that non-alignment is an idea that evolves but does not fade. We must take it forward, harnessing it to meet the challenges of today,” he said, amid growing scepticism on the relevance of a movement started in the Cold War era.
The relevance of NAM, he countered, had never been greater than today.
‘Economic crisis’
Focusing on the economic challenges ahead, he said no other NAM summit had ever “been held in an economic and financial crisis of the magnitude that now grips the world”.
Opening the two-day Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit of the 118 developing nations at this Red Sea resort city, Cuban President Raul Castro said earlier in the day that grouping believes that all countries in the world should search for effective and justified measures to tackle the current financial crisis.
—-Agencies