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G-8 Summit to Start in Okinawa Today
Leaders from the Group of Eight major nations will start an annual summit in Nago, Okinawa Prefecture, on Friday, to look for ways to resolve a host of political, economic and other major problems faced by the international community today and in the immediate future.
At a dinner party scheduled Friday night, the leaders will discuss some regional issues, including the Middle East peace process, the situation on the Korean Peninsula, and such political issues as conflict prevention, U.N. reforms and arms control.
Except for U.S. President Bill Clinton, who left the United States Thursday, Mori and the other G-8 leaders jointly met in Tokyo with a group of leaders from developing countries, including Nigeria, South Africa and Thailand. They discussed various issues such as poverty, AIDS and other infectious diseases as well as lack of access to the Internet.
"This year's G-8 summit will seek to discuss what these countries should do to help usher the world into a new and better century, with the focus on ways to make individual nations and the entire world more prosperous and stable in the new age," a Foreign Ministry official said.
The Okinawa summit also is expected to explore ways and means of meeting the various challenges the ongoing information technology revolution presents.
Another focus of summit talks is expected to be the proposed U.S. National Missile Defense (NMD) system, which would deploy hundreds of interceptor missiles in Alaska and North Dakota. During a recent meeting of G-8 foreign ministers in Miyazaki in the runup to the Okinawa summit, Russia, Germany and France expressed their alarm over the controversial NMD system.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, participating in his first G-8 summit, is expected to become a focus of attention because of his recent critical comment about the NMD issue.
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