NEW YORK | ASTANA – As co-chair, along with Japan, of the Conference to facilitate entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), Kazakhstan has condemned North Korea’s hydrogen bomb test on January 6 and declared “such actions” of DPRK as “unacceptable” and “in violation of the UN Security Council resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013) and 2094 (2013)”.
In a statement, the Kazakh Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “Kazakhstan believes the actions of DPRK seriously undermine the international community’s efforts along the path of nuclear disarmament and strengthening the non-proliferation regime and global security in general, as well as the efforts of the majority of the countries in the world to ensure the early entry into force of the CTBT.“
Kazakhstan, as a country whose people have directly experienced the deadly effects of nuclear weapons, voluntarily renounced the possession of a nuclear arsenal and initiated the adoption of a UN General Assembly resolution proclaiming August 29 as the International Day against Nuclear Tests, the statement added.
“We stand for the complete ban on nuclear tests in the world,” declared the statement, and call upon North Korea to abandon nuclear weapon ambitions and resume negotiations in the six-party format involving China, Russia, the United States, the Republic of Korea and Japan.
The statement added: “We remain firmly convinced that keys to security and sustainable development lie not in nuclear arsenals but in a wide mutually beneficial cooperation, along with peaceful resolution of all problems in international relations through negotiations.”
Global security, it added, generally can only be guaranteed when the world frees itself from the nuclear weapons. “It is the goal that our nation and President Nursultan Nazarbayev have consistently called upon the international community to embrace and to reach, including President Nazarbayev’s call for humanity to make the world without nuclear weapons its major goal in the 21st century,” the Kazakh foreign affairs ministry said. (INPS | 7 January 2016)
Image: Monument of Independence, Republic Square, Almaty | Credit: Wikimedia Commons