Indian Minister urges his ASEM counterparts to share condolence with storm-affected nations
Cambodia News & New Youth Correspondent
Delhi-NCR, India (11 November, 2013): Indian External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid on Monday appealed his Asian and European counterparts who joined the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Foreign Ministers’ Meeting here to share condolences with the Philippines and Vietnam where over 10 thousands of people are feared to be dead and millions of others are affected.
Up to 10,000 people are believed to have died in Philippines’ Tacloban city and four million others have been affected while many are now displacing and struggling to survive without food, shelter or clean drinking water, according to BBC report Monday.
The BBC quoted Richard Gordon, head of the Philippine Red Cross, as saying that “There’s an awful lot of casualties, a lot of people dead all over the place, a lot of destruction.”
The storm has since made landfall in northern Vietnam, near the Chinese border and some 600,000 people have been evacuated from at-risk regions in Vietnam and reports say 11 people have been killed (One journalist also died in an accident on her way to cover the storm), BBC reports, adding that China also issued a typhoon alert for Hainan island, Guangdong and Guangxi after Haiyan’s path changed.
Speaking to the 11th ASEM Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Delhi NCR (National Capital Region) – India’s largest and the world’s second largest home with more than 22 million population – Khurshid urged that everybody had to join him to “express our concern and solidarity” with the two nations where they are facing with tropical storm Haiyan.
ASEM has 51 members: Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Cambodia, China, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Laos, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mongolia, Myanmar, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, Viet Nam, the European Commission and the ASEAN Secretariat.
