Iranian Assails Iraqis at Nonaligned Meeting

Cuban President Fidel Castro on Tuesday accused the United States of defying the world by supporting anti-Marxist rebels in Nicaragua as tempers flared at the summit meeting of nations professing nonalignment.

At one point, leaders of the 101-member movement listened in embarrassed silence while Iran demanded the expulsion of fellow member Iraq and accused its enemy of war crimes surpassing those of the Nazis.

Outside the conference hall, Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi’s security guards, trying to crowd in with him, clashed with Zimbabwean security officers and were driven off, witnesses reported.

“The Zimbabweans and Libyans literally got into a scrimmage,” said one diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Attacks on U.S.

Inside the flag-bedecked hall, the leaders pressed on into a late-night session on the second day of their weeklong summit.

Castro described a $100-million U.S. aid package to Nicaraguan rebels as an “open and shameless slap in the face for the peoples of Latin America and the world.”

The package won congressional approval in August, and military and logistical aid to the guerrillas, or contras, is expected to start flowing this month.

‘War of Aggression’

“Nicaragua is suffering a dirty war of aggression. Its economy is blockaded, its ports are mined, thousands of mercenaries at the service of a foreign power are invading its territory from Honduras,” Castro said.

“The Yankees will have to relearn the tragic lesson of Vietnam,” he asserted.

Castro pledged that Cuba would keep troops in Marxist Angola “so long as there is apartheid in South Africa.”

Cuba has stationed about 25,000 soldiers in Angola for 10 years. South Africa says that free, pre-independence elections cannot take place in Namibia until the Cubans leave Angola.

Angola is the base for guerrillas fighting to end South African control of Namibia.

In the Iran-Iraq squabble, national television broadcasts of the proceedings were abruptly suspended as President Ali Khamenei of Iran brushed aside appeals for peace talks in Iran’s six-year-old war with Iraq.

“The Iraqi crimes, according to many international authorities, have made Genghis Khan and Hitler seem tame in comparison,” the Iranian said.

Khamenei turned on Iraq during a two-hour speech that included a long attack on the United States, which he described as “the arch-Satan.”

Zimbabwe Prime Minister Robert Mugabe chided Khamenei for the length of his speech, which helped force the late-night sitting.

The Iraqi delegation made no immediate response. But in a closed session of a political committee, officials from the two countries later shouted at each other, diplomats reported.

The Nonaligned Movement, founded at a meeting in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 25 years ago, presents itself as being independent of the United States and the Soviet Union.