Poor nations' leaders unleash anger, despair at UN summit

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Leaders from the world's poorest countries freely expressed their disappointment and bitterness on Sunday at a UN summit over how richer counterparts are treating their countries.

Many called on the developed powers to come good with the promised aid to help them flee poverty and fight climate change.  

During the UN Least Developed Countries summit in Doha, the president of the Central African Republic said that his resource-rich but the impoverished country was being "looted" by "Western powers". 

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres followed up an attack he made a day before on the "predatory" interest rates that international banks imposed on poor countries.    

There could be "no more excuses" for not giving aid, he said.

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Despite the dire need for funding, no significant announcements were made on the first day of the general debate at the once-in-a-decade summit, with the exception of the $60 million pledged by the host nation Qatar for UN programs. 

Leaders of the major economies have been strikingly absent from the debate on the unrest in poor countries.  

Guterres called on Saturday during a meeting with LDC leaders for $500 billion to be mobilized for social and economic transformation.  

Leaders also used the first day of public debate, which will last for five days, to renew demands that industrialized governments send a promised $100 billion a year to support them in fighting global warming.  

Presidents and prime ministers from Africa and the Asia-Pacific region voiced appeals for financial action.  

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Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said poorer countries "deserve" to be certain about the money for development and climate.  

"The international community must renew its commitment for real structural transformation in LDCs," Hasina said, adding, "Our nations do not ask for charity. What we seek are our due international commitments."    

Zambia's President Hakainde Hichilema stressed that providing the money was "a matter of credibility".

"LDCs cannot afford another lost decade," Narayan Kaji Shrestha, deputy prime minister of Nepal, said.

Shrestha said that in the fifty years since LDC status was formed to give nations trade privileges and cheaper finance, they had been "fighting an epic battle against poverty, hunger, disease, and illiteracy."  

He noted that just six nations had already escaped the LDC status that some countries consider a stigma.  

President Faustin-Archange Touadera of the Central African Republic lashed out at sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council and other institutions against the big but thinly populated nation that has witnessed decades of instability.  

Touadera said the country's 5.5 million people could not get how, with vast reserves of gold, diamonds, cobalt, oil, and uranium, it "remains, more than 60 years after independence, one of the poorest in the world".    

"Central African Republic has always been wrongly considered by certain Western powers as a reserve for strategic materials," he added.

"It has suffered a systematic looting since its independence, helped by political instability supported by certain Western powers or their allies."