HIROSHIMA, August 7 ------ Hiroshima marked the 79th anniversary on Tuesday of its atomic bombing by the United States, with its mayor urging world leaders to shift away from nuclear weapons amid global conflicts including Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East. A moment of silence was observed at 8:15 a.m., the exact time that the nuclear bomb was dropped by the U.S. bomber Enola Gay and detonated over the city on Aug. 6, 1945, killing an estimated 140,000 people by the end of the year.
In the Peace Declaration, read during the annual ceremony in the Peace Memorial Park, Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui called for unity and trust through dialogue to encourage a shift away from nuclear deterrence. "It seems to me that these global tragedies are deepening distrust and fear among nations, reinforcing the public assumption that, to solve international problems, we have to rely on military force, which we should be rejecting," he said.
The mayor said the Cold War was brought to an end through dialogue between Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, and then U.S. President Ronald Reagan. "To extinguish the suspicion and doubt that creates conflicts, civil society must foster a circle of trust through exchange and dialogue with consideration for others," Matsui said.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who represents a constituency in Hiroshima, will also give remarks at the ceremony. The ceremony was attended by around 50,000 people, including representatives from 109 nations and the European Union, at a time when nuclear threats have been repeatedly made by Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, while Israel's war with Hamas risks spilling into a wider conflict. The Hiroshima city government invited Israel, widely regarded as a nuclear-armed state, alongside a call for an immediate ceasefire to the conflict in the Palestinian territory, which has drawn increasing international opposition. But the invitation has been criticized as a double standard by some, as Russia and Belarus have been barred from the ceremony for three consecutive years over the invasion of Ukraine. The Palestinian Embassy also criticized Hiroshima for not inviting Palestine to the ceremony.
In the declaration, the mayor also urged all world leaders to visit Hiroshima in the hope that they will "gain a deeper understanding of the atomic bombing" and "issue a compelling call for the abolition of nuclear weapons." In addition, Matsui in his speech lamented the failure of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty Review Conference to adopt a final document for the second time in a row, saying the stalemate "revealed a harsh reality, namely, the enormous differences among countries with respect to nuclear weapons." Three days after the bomb, nicknamed "Little Boy," decimated Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered to the Allied forces six days later, marking the end of World War II. The combined number of officially recognized survivors of the two nuclear attacks, known as hibakusha, stood at 106,825 as of March this year, down by 6,824 from a year earlier, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Their average age exceeded 85.
Source: news.abs-cbn.com
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