Resurrecting Bandung spirit

It has already been hailed by some of its participants as a "historical watershed" in international relations, especially for the third word. But in the post 9/11 world ravaged by two pre-emptive wars waged by the world's sole superpower in pursuance of its national security strategy to achieve unchallengeable primacy in the new century, doubts abound if the spirit fostered fifty years ago can indeed be revived. Will NAASP be able to play a role in moderating the excesses of unilateral pre-emptive use of force and promote a multi-lateral international order?

A retrospective glance at the international situation that obtained half a century ago when the first Afro-Asian conference was held would help focus attention on the tectonic shift that has taken place since then, and find out whether it is anymore possible to reassert the spirit that the original Bandung meet gave birth to. Faced by the wave of Pax Americana, will a reinvigoration of the Bandung spirit among the leaders of Asia and Africa -- a sine qua non of the multi-polar world the pioneers of Bandung dreamt of -- work?

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Even in the 1950s, the world's geo-political landscape was not without its chasms. The decade was marked by an international scene dominated by the US and the USSR, two superpowers armed with thousands of kilotons of nuclear weapon and inter-continental missile delivery system dedicated to mutually assured destruction, and were locked in a nerve-racking cold war. But then the first Afro-Asian conference was attended by larger than life figures of the stature of Zhou En Lai of China, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Ahmad Sukarno of Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. All of these stalwarts were anti-colonial warriors, visionaries, and committed to a brave new world. With this breed of leaders vanished from the scene, the leadership in the developing world is today dominated by mediocrity and servility, incapable of breaking through a complex web of intrigues being hatched by the powerful.

Even if scores of countries in the third world are for resurrecting the Bandung spirit and their new strategic partnership calls for a multilateral approach to conflict resolution and to addressing the issues of terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, many in their ranks are the staunch allies of the US, and in one way or other subscribe to its neo-conservative philosophy. The Central Asian republics, the Gulf states, and a number of other Arab states have close relations with the sole superpower and are at its service to promote the interests of Israel. India also is on the way to becoming the US' strategic partner. How they all will balance the conflicting paradigms of Bandung and beyond remain to be seen.

It was at Bandung that the seeds of the Non-Aligned Movement, which took concrete shape at Belgrade in 1961, were sown. The bipolarity of the post-war years having passed into history and with the advent of a unipolar world, an unrivalled US seems determined to achieve the strategic goals of its project for a New American Century. In that it has already successfully launched two wars and altered the geo-politics of the Middle East in favour of Israel. As against this, third world countries can no longer anchor their international relations to non-alignment, and they have to perforce readjust their politico-security policies towards co-existence with the sole superpower and a recourse to opportunism, expediency, and conformity. In that milieu there is little chance to reassert the Bandung spirit aimed at wiping out an attempt for new imperium and neo-colonialism. Can those goals be achieved by the Allawis, Karzais, and Abu Mazens of this world?

Even if Bandung 2005 continues to back a sovereign Palestinian state, there is no visible sign on the part of NAASP that it will take a stand against Israel's undermining of the Quartet's road map to a viable Palestinian state by withdrawing its settlements only from the Gaza but consolidating those in the West Bank and East Jerusalem that have been under occupation for forty years. Neither is it in a mood to safeguard Iran's right under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes (even under intrusive IAEA inspection), which is being challenged by the US at the present NPT's seventh review conference in New York.

Spirit is generated in the human mind and is preceded by renaissance in all human activities -- arts and literature, ideas and ingenuity, morality and ethics, politics and social reform. The spirit generated at Bandung did not come from nowhere. Unless the present stupor in thought is broken, new ideas cannot be born -- let alone the spirit of the original Bandung.

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.