Haniya won’t attend Tehran NAM summit, announces 'boycott' of the meeting.

Haniya won’t attend Tehran NAM summit, announces 'boycott' of the meeting.(GT).Gaza’s Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya will not attend an upcoming Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran, Taher al-Nunu, a spokesman for the Hamas government, said yesterday. “The prime minister received a generous invitation from the Iranian president to participate in the NAM summit,” he wrote in a statement, adding that Haniya initially “said he might be going but he decided today to apologise”.
It was a swift U-turn for the Islamist movement which had on Saturday announced that Haniya would attend the summit following an “invitation from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad”.
Iran’s foreign ministry confirmed that Haniya had been invited to the gathering as a “special guest”.
But the announcement sparked a furious response from the rival Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, with Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki saying President Mahmoud Abbas would boycott the summit if Haniya attended.
Nunu said that as a consequence Haniya had decided to stay at home in the interests of Palestinian solidarity.
“He didn’t want his participation to lead to deepening Palestinian, Arab and Islamic divisions on the Palestinian cause,” his statement said.
Yesterday morning, Iran also executed a swift U-turn, saying Haniya had never been invited in the first place.
Summit spokesman Mohamed Reza Forqani said in a statement quoted by the Isna and Mehr news agencies that “no official invitation from the Islamic Republic of Iran” or Ahmadinejad had been sent to Haniya “up to now”. Shortly afterwards, Malki told AFP that the Palestinian Authority had received personal assurances from his Iranian counterpart Ali Akbar Salehi that Haniya “wasn’t invited to attend the summit in any way”. Malki said he would travel to Tehran today for further “clarification and reassurance” from the Iranians, and only after that would Abbas’s own attendance be confirmed. The Non-Aligned Movement conference, a grouping of developing nations founded during the Cold War, has emerged from obscurity with this year’s summit - largely thanks to the fact that its revolving leadership has passed to Iran. Iran hopes to earn diplomatic kudos by hosting the summit from August 29-31 at a time when the West is seeking to cripple its economy and isolate it diplomatically over its disputed nuclear programme. Israel and the US have already exhorted UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to cancel his planned attendance because of Iran’s involvement. Egypt, last year’s chair of the organisation, will be represented by newly-elected president Mohamed Mursi. His Islamist affinity with Hamas along with rising militancy in the Sinai Peninsula adjoining Israel has strained Egyptian-Israeli relations. Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halqi and Foreign Minister Walid Muallem will attend the summit, a top Iranian official announced in Damascus yesterday. Aladin Borujerdi, the head of the Iranian parliament’s foreign policy committee, on a visit to Damascus, said that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad informed him at a meeting that Halqi and Muallem would attend the NAM summit.Read the full story here.