Non-alignment movement no longer inspires confidence

In plenary session in New Delhi next week is the world's largest and most raucous club. The Non-aligned, with more than 100 foreign ministers attending. The club is weighted down by numbers it has 95 full members, 21 observers, three guests, spanning four continents and crippled by the lack of a sense of direction.In its depths are ingathered, to borrow a Homeric phrase, the scattered leaves of the world's contemporary quarrels and conflicts. Still it provides an umbrella to two-thirds of the UN members. united by nothing more solid than the fig-leaf of a label. The club is immensely popular only because it has lost most of its salience to prevailing and emerging world realities. The New Delhi meeting itself is a kind of an elaborate rhetorical ritual. It has no agenda. It should have met in Havana. However, too many members developed a strong distaste for Fidel Castro's city because of its Soviet connections. They fastened upon New Delhi and the Government of India had to reluctantly agree to host the session. Precisely because there is no urgency for the meeting, it is going to be a noisy, even ribald affair. To provide a framework for the clash of diplomatic swords, the Indian Foreign Office drafted a memorandum which senior officials took to several non-aligned capitals to pre-empt a repeat performance of the Havana summit of October 1979. At that sixth non-aligned summit, the Cuban draft proved to be a hornet's nest; 150 pages of amendments were moved to the 30-page revised draft; the final declaration contained only, a residual flavour of Castro's stilted ideological prose. Since South Block is still proud of the English prose of India's diplomacy, it does not wish to see its draft perforated by Arab. African and Latin American bullets.Quarrels: Contrary to press reports, the Foreign Office engaged in pre-conference consultations mainly out of politeness. Indian officials know that when the non-aligned quarrel among themselves at meetings of the club, no one gets really hurt. Over the years the non-aligned have crafted a code of quarrelling. They turn a Nelson's eye on their own sins of omission and commission. They compose mile-long communiques the opiate of diplomats - in the most ambiguous language that the homo sapien is capable of. The firmest part of the code is that the club shall not break. Quarrel as much as is necessary, but end up with the Cheshire cat's smile of compromise.Only one member has resigned from the club since it was formed 20 years ago. Burma, one of the original members, walked out in Havana for no more flimsy reason than Castro's valiant but unsuccessful attempt to tie the silken bondage of "natural ally" between the Socialist club and the Non-aligned. Castro met with strong resistance from a group led by the late Tito of Yugoslavia who questioned if Castro's was his own man in Havana. Castro's foreign minister will keep a low profile at next week's meeting in New Delhi.When 100 foreign ministers meet, dramatics are very likely. But nothing of substance is likely to emerge at the Delhi meet. The non-aligned performance in recent years has been so dismal that it is difficult to see what contribution the foreign ministers can make to a settlement of the world's pressing problems. They will, of course, quarrel over the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, and end up by opposing all foreign interventions anywhere by anyone. At the Havana summit, the quarrels centred mainly on Egypt and Kampuchea. The "confrontationist" Arabs demanded the suspension of Egypt for signing the Camp David accord. Two regimes the ousted regime of Pol Pot and the Vietnam-backed regime of Heng Samrin - duelled for the Kampuchea seat at the non-aligned club. The summit finally got rid of the two nagging issues by referring both to- committees. In that process, however, the Pol Pot regime had to vacate the Kampuchea seat-a small victory for Vietnam.The Arab scene has changed since the Havana summit; the confrontationists are confused, and Iraq-once the most vocal of them-is fighting the Third World's longest war with another non-aligned country, Iran. Sadat is not exactly having sleepless nights fearing suspension in New Delhi. Since the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) is still not in a mood to recognise the Heng Samrin regime, the Kampuchean issue will once again be put on ice.There will be some fireworks on Afghanistan, but the fury of the Islamic bloc within the club is largely spent. Pakistan and Iran have found themselves in agreement with Afghanistan and the Soviet Union that the former three countries should talk under the auspices of the United Nations. The New Delhi meeting itself may initiate direct contacts between Pakistan and Afghanistan.The non-aligned will, of course, cry out for a world of peace and understanding, rebuke the superpowers for rekindling the ebbing embers of the cold war, for triggering another world-wide arms race. But they will ignore how the nonaligned themselves have been arming to the teeth, how they invade one another's territory, intervene with military force in one another's internal affairs, lend bases to the superpowers for largesse generously given. It does not matter that the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which consists almost entirely of non-aligned countries, has been draining out the last drop of blood from the arteries of the poorest members of the club. It does not matter if several non-aligned countries in Africa are afflicted by prolonged famine, and the nonaligned do nothing to help their hungry people. It matters even less that collective self-reliance remains a non-emotive slogan, and trade and economic relations among the non-aligned tend to shrink.Historical Role: Over the decades of its history, non-alignment has lost its classical mooring; it is now the world's largest international club in quest of a role. When the movement was baptised at Belgrade in 1961, its first phase had already ended -the phase of direct struggle with imperialism during the decolonisation transition. At Belgrade, the non-aligned club identified itself with the Third World ; the Third World identity persisted till the Lusaka summit in 1970. Then came the identification with New International Economic Order (NIEO). The non-aligned became the South in its confrontation with the North. The confrontation, however, could not bend the industrialised North. Since 1975, when Henry Kissinger made what seemed to be a highly regarded speech at the seventh special session of the UN, the North has talked the South to death, yielding nothing of substance, Even promises to be serious about two issues which would have worked to the advantage of the US-food and trade reform-have made little progress. And to mock the entire enterprise, the UN session last year was devoted for three whole weeks only to talk about talks.With this performance record, the non-aligned no longer inspire confidence in any of the three worlds into which the nations inhabiting the planet are classified. The world in which non-alignment was a viable foreign policy doctrine has passed; the movement has served its historical role. It has accomplished a lot - given new nations a proud identity of their own, helped them strengthen their independence and sovereignty, resist pressures and cajolements of the major powers.Now, in the very different world of the '80s, non-alignment has lost its wings. The superpowers-two co-equals in military power -are using subtle means to influence countries of the Third World where they have engaged in direct mutually assertive competition. In recent weeks, US and Soviet analysts have shown remarkable similarity in their perceptions of the non-aligned club. According to the Soviets, it is split into three groups-a vanguard group led by Vietnam, Cuba and other friends of the USSR, a pro-imperialist group which toes the American line, and an in-between group that sways between the two poles. Soviet analysts have always valued non-alignment mainly for its anti-imperialist role, which, in Leninist theory, makes it the natural ally of world socialism. Anti-imperialism itself has different scales; even the moderately anti-imperialist nations like India. Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria and Argentina are more important to Moscow than the hopelessly pro-imperialists like Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Americans too see the non-aligned in the context of their competition and confrontation with the USSR. The Congressional Quarterly, in its latest editorial research report on foreign policy, classifies Africa -from where more than half the non-aligned come -into four groups of countries, pro-Soviet, pro-French, pro-West and "non-aligned". By "non-aligned" it means those countries that have no definite tilt, and are therefore priority targets of diplomatic influence.Castro (left) and Mrs Gandhi: : A rudderless clubDisparate Club: The self-image of the non-aligned themselves has changed. The club was never fully cohesive; now it is disparate to the limit. Its members are knots of groups and sub-groups. The pro-Soviet group consists of 12 to 15 nations. The much larger Islamic group is torn into a number of sub-groups. The sub-Saharan Africans try to present a united front and more often than not fail to do so. The Latin Americans are split into three sub-groups - left, centre and right.The big among the non-aligned-India, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Nigeria and Indonesia have their own distances from the small and the medium. These big nations are emerging as power centres on their own merit, their relations with the superpowers falling into a pattern very different from those of the small and medium countries of the Third World, It follows, then, that none of the big, new centres of power can lead the nonaligned club.All this does not mean that India is not non-aligned. India is and for ever shall be, whether its own special brand of non-alignment is "real" or "genuine' the door of the club closes on none. Pakistan is as much non-aligned as India, and so are Egypt, Vietnam, Cuba and Kenya. Rumania, Spain and Portugal are "guests" of the club, regardless of their linkage with the Warsaw Pact or North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The Philippines is an "observer", with the same rights as a member, though it has renewed till 1983 its military base agreement with the United States. Non-alignment does not foreclose any relationship that a practising nation may choose to have with either superpower. It doesn't bar alliance, even a military one, affirms P.N. Haksar in his Premonitions. It doesn't imply equidistance, says Foreign Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao.It doesn't prevent a non-aligned nation from invading another, cynically violating a treaty still in force -look at Iraq. Nor from military intervention in a sister nonaligned country's internal politics -that's what Tanzania did in the Uganda of Idi Amin. According to the 1979 prescription of the club's coordinating committee, a nation is non-aligned if it is involved in the struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, apartheid, racism including Zionism, exploitation, great-power and bloc policies, and all forms of foreign occupation, domination and hegemony.This astonishingly permissive definition may soon embrace the whole planet. The superpowers, however, will be left out, for, bless them, they keep the unquiet rudderless club of the non-aligned floating.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 28, 2013 15:57 IST--- ENDS ---

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Non-alignment movement no longer inspires confidence

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