TEHRAN: A showpiece summit hosted by Iran stumbled as soon as it opened Thursday when Egypt’s new leader publicly sided with Syria’s opposition and the head of the U.N. pressed Tehran on its nuclear stand.
 
The double challenge, before the leaders and delegates of the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement, upset Iran’s plans to portray the two-day gathering as a diplomatic triumph over Western efforts to isolate it.
 
President Mohammad Mursi slammed Syria’s regime as “oppressive” and urged support for rebels seeking President Bashar Assad’s ouster.
 
His address prompted a walkout by the Damascus delegation and drew a sharp response from Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem, who accused him of inciting further bloodshed in Syria.
 
It also embarrassed the Iranian hosts of the two-day NAM summit, who are staunch supporters of Assad’s regime.
 
“The revolution in Egypt is the cornerstone for the Arab Spring, which started days after Tunisia and was followed by Libya and Yemen and now the revolution in Syria against its oppressive regime,” Mursi said in his speech.
 
That contradicted the line put out by Damascus and Tehran, which assert that the Syrian uprising is a “terrorist” plot masterminded by the United States and regional countries.
 
“Our solidarity with the struggle of Syrians against an oppressive regime that has lost its legitimacy is an ethical duty, and a political and strategic necessity,” Mursi added.
 
His comments amounted to “interference in Syria’s internal affairs and ... incites continued bloodshed in Syria,” Moallem said afterward, as quoted by Syrian state television.
 
Mursi, whose Muslim Brotherhood movement is affiliated with one of Syria’s main opposition groups, became the first Egyptian leader to visit Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when he landed in Tehran early Thursday.
 
Egypt severed ties with Iran in the aftermath of the revolution that brought to power a theocracy that opposed Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and welcomed the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who forged the deal.
 
Seated at the summit next to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mursi was attending the meeting to hand over the NAM’s rotating leadership to Iran.
 
The two leaders later met – in their first-ever bilateral meeting – on the sidelines of the summit and discussed the Syrian conflict and their states’ severed diplomatic ties.
 
“They emphasized the need to solve the Syria crisis via diplomacy and to prevent foreign intervention,” Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian told Iran’s Arabic-language broadcaster Al-Alam.
 
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei opened the summit with a speech blasting the United States as a hegemonic meddler and Israel as a regime of “Zionist wolves.”
 
He also said Iran “is never seeking nuclear weapons” and accused the U.N. Security Council, under U.S. influence, of exerting an “overt dictatorship” over the world.
 
That drew a sharp response from U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon, who shot back that Iran should boost global confidence in its nuclear activities by “fully complying with the relevant Security Council resolutions and thoroughly cooperating with the IAEA,” the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog.
 
Ban, whose presence at the summit had been criticized by the United States and Israel, took Iran’s leaders to task for recent comments calling Israel a “cancerous tumor” that should be cut out of the Middle East.
 
He urged both Iran and Israel to cool the bellicose language.
 
“I strongly reject any threat by any [U.N.] member state to destroy another, or outrageous comments to deny historical facts such as the Holocaust,” Ban said in his summit speech.
 
“I urge all the parties to stop provocative and inflammatory threats. A war of words can quickly spiral into war of violence. Bluster can so easily become bloodshed. Now is the time for all the leaders to use their voices to lower, not raise, tensions.”
 
The summit to-and-fro over Iran’s nuclear ambitions had its roots in an unusually frank meeting Ban held with Khamenei and Ahmadinejad after arriving Wednesday.
 
He told them Iran needed to provide “concrete” steps to ease the international showdown which has raised the specter of airstrikes on nuclear facilities, threatened by both Israel and the United States.
 
Also raising tensions, the summit coincided with the unveiling of an IAEA “task force” to scrutinize Tehran’s nuclear program and its compliance with U.N. resolutions.
 
The latest IAEA report on Iran circulated to members of the body Thursday, but not yet published, said Tehran has doubled its capacity at a tough-to-bomb Fordo nuclear facility to 2,000 uranium-enrichment centrifuges from 1,000 in May.It also said that its ability to inspect the Parchin military base, outside Tehran, where it suspects nuclear weapons research took place, had been “significantly hampered” by a suspected cleanup.
 
The IAEA said it was still “unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”
 
Washington said it was closely scrutinizing the IAEA report and warned Tehran its window for opening serious talks is limited.
 
“The window of opportunity to resolve this remains open ... but it will not remain open indefinitely,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
 
Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, said he would address the U.N. next month to condemn Iran and tell world nations that Iran was a “terrorist regime” that poses the greatest threat to world peace.