The 15th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was held at Sharm-EI-Sheikh, a Red Sea resort in Egypt, on July 15-16, 2009.
The summit had an agenda that was both focused and compact, emphasising the need for collective action on the principal global issues of the day. It issued a concluding declaration barely five pages long, perhaps the shortest ever.
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Disarmament:
On disarmament the NAM leaders agreed to engage constructively with ‘concrete actions’ the nuclear weapon states are obliged to take towards disarmament as well as recent statements by U.S. President Barack Obama and others to work towards a world free of nuclear weapons.
Middle East:
The NAM leaders strongly endorsed the need for a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East based, inter alia, on the recent Arab Peace Initiative in its entirety. They called for the establishment of an independent, contiguous and viable state in Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital and said they stood firmly against all settlement activity illegally undertaken by Israel in the Occupied Territories.
Speaking at the opening session, Cuban President Raul Castro in his capacity as Chairman of the last NAM summit, called for a new monetary and economic world order to take into consideration the needs of developing countries. The Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi blamed the west for the problems of global warming, nuclear proliferation and terrorism.
The Chairman of the 15th NAM, Hosni Mubarak, the President of Egypt, echoed the sentiments of the august members calling for “a new international political, economic and commercial order that is more fair and balanced, an order that is away from selectivity and double standards, an order that takes into consideration the preoccupations and priorities of developing countries, one that establishes democracy in interaction between the rich and the poor countries.”
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who also addressed the opening session of the 15th NAM, too threw in his lot with the grouping which spans an arc from South America, Africa, the Middle-East, South Asia and South-East Asia.