Malaysia fully supports denuclearisation – Mat Sabu

SINGAPORE: Malaysia fully supports denuclearisation and hopes efforts towards this end will not only focus on certain countries like North Korea and Iran alone, said Malaysian Defence Minister Mohamad Sabu.

“It needs to be applied to all (countries ),” he told the media on the sidelines of the 17th ShangriLa Dialogue (SLD) yesterday.

Mohamad , more popularly known as Mat Sabu, said Malaysia welcomed the nuclear talks between United States President Donald J Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jongun scheduled to take place in Singapore on June 12.

“It’s a good effort… We (the world) did experience atomic bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We don’t want it to be repeated in the Asian region.

“That was the technology 70 or 60 years ago. We do not know the nuclear technology that we have now. It is very dangerous and we will give our full support to any effort towards denuclearisation,” he said.

Mohamad also described the scheduled meeting between Trump and Kim as a good start.

Asked to comment on US Secretary of Defence James Mattis’ speech that was rather hard on China, Mohamad said that Malaysia had always maintained its neutrality, something that the country has been championing since Tun Abdul Razak Hussein’s (Malaysia’s second prime minister) premiership.

In his speech, Mattis had specifically called out Beijing’s militarisation of artificial islands in the area.

“We do not want any clash to occur in the South China Sea and we are very concerned about what is happening there,” said Mohamad, adding that ASEAN member countries have always carried out dialogues with both China and the United States.