Africa-Press – Cape verde. Dozens of heads of State and Government will meet from Monday at the 19th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (MNA), which will continue in Kampala until Saturday, with the aim of improving cooperation in the face of crises international.The summit begins on Monday with preparatory conferences for the meeting of heads of state and government, scheduled for Friday and Saturday.
“The summit will become a platform for global cooperation and security and the promotion of our common goals,” said Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni last November.
“Uganda is ready to show its hospitality and contribute to the success of the summit,” added Museveni, who has been in power since 1986.
Since the creation of the MNA in 1961, this is the sixth time that the 120 member states have met in an African country, after summits in Zambia (1970), Algeria (1973), Zimbabwe (1986), South Africa (1998) and Egypt (2009).
This time, the forum will take place at the Speke Convention Center, a bucolic hotel on the banks of Lake Victoria, with an auditorium with capacity for 4,400 people and 12 conference rooms.
In this southern corner of Kampala, leaders will discuss issues such as global security, the international fight against terrorism, migration, humanitarian crises and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, among others, under the theme “Deepening Cooperation for Wealth Global Sharing”, announced the Ugandan Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jeje Odongo.
Furthermore, Museveni will become the new rotating chairman of the MNA, a position held since 2019 by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
Uganda will host leaders from around the world, although there is no official list of participants yet.
The MNA, one of the largest organizations of States in the world, is made up of 53 countries in Africa, 39 in Asia, 26 in Latin America and the Caribbean and two in Europe.
“We will host 168 delegations from 135 countries, as well as a large number of international organizers and observer states,” said Ugandan Ministry of Foreign Affairs Permanent Secretary Vincent Bagiire.
The summit comes at a time when, faced with international crises such as Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip or Russia’s conflict in Ukraine, the Global South demands a greater voice in international bodies, including the UN Security Council , for which they ask for restructuring.
In fact, South-South cooperation is expected to be another of the main themes of the summit, with talks starting on Monday with meetings of senior officials from the MNA countries, before the ministerials scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday.
The summit of heads of state and government will begin with speeches by Museveni, Aliyev, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and UN Secretary-General António Guterres, among others, according to a provisional program sent today to EFE by the organizers.
To ensure the safety of all participants, Uganda created a strong security arrangement, closing roads and imposing access restrictions to areas close to the Speke Convention Center.
Security is one of Uganda’s top priorities, after the embassies of some Western countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, warned of the possibility of terrorist attacks in the country.
In recent years, the rebel group Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), based in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and with unclear links to the Islamic State (IS), has carried out sporadic attacks on Ugandan soil.
But the president of the summit’s organizing committee, Lucy Nakyobe, stressed this week that “the country is safe and ready to receive international visitors.”
On the 21st of this month, one day after the MNA summit, Uganda will also host the Third Southern Summit of the Group of 77 (G77) + China, which will take place over three days, with Cuba ceding the rotating presidency of the bloc to the African country .
The G77, a group of 133 member states excluding China, is the largest coalition of countries in the Global South.
These two world summits are among the biggest that Uganda has organized after the Commonwealth summit in 2007.
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