scoundrels?
In the course of researching this article, I telephoned a former colleague in London who is responsible for organising much of the foreign coverage on an international financial publication.
I have often used him as a sounding- board for ideas and arguments, and I asked his thoughts on the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).
He was astounded to hear that vast amounts of money – at least R60- million at last count – were being spent to enable heads of state from many of NAM’s 113 member countries to meet in Durban between Saturday (August 29) and Thursday (September 3).
“You mean to say,” he exclaimed, “the Non-Aligned Movement still exists? Haven’t they heard the Berlin Wall came down 10 years ago?”
Well, apparently not – if non- alignment as a political principle ever was the major reason for the organisation’s existence.
Some suspect it never was. In their eyes, member states’ high-minded assertion of “positive neutrality” between the United States and its Cold War rival, the former Soviet Union, became perhaps more typically an attempt to play West off against East in a scramble for aid and favours.
The great thaw might have occurred 10 years ago, but members of NAM remain where most of them were long before that: still out in the cold, relatively poor and feeling aggrieved about it.
In this view, NAM summits, including the forthcoming one, are merely jamborees for many of the world’s most accomplished con-men, rogues, whingers and scroungers.
One vacuous resolution will be piled upon another bemoaning the poorer countries’ marginalisation. And NAM’s proceedings will not make one blind bit of difference within those international institutions that do actually have consequences – the International Monetary Fund, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the Security Council, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, and the like.
That is why many serious observers of international affairs, such as my former colleague, have been paying NAM summits no attention for the past 10 years. It is why others have been doing the same for much longer. NAM is off-radar for many.
It is also why NAM needs South Africa. Deputy President Thabo Mbeki can give it an intelligence, and perhaps the new vision, it sorely needs. President Nelson Mandela can lend it the gravitas and dignity it has lacked since, perhaps, the days of Jawalal Nehru, the Indian leader who was one of its founding fathers back in 1961.
It was then, in 1961, that leaders of about 35 countries and territories from Africa, Asia and along the Mediterranean coastline met in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, to define for themselves their own particular place in the world.
They were, in the main, weak young states emerging from colonisation, presided over by inexperienced, intellectual and bureaucratic elites, and targets for the blandishments and threats of the major powers.
They declared their hope that NAM could offer them a collective voice to help defend their individual identities and to advance their case for a new international economic order. They raised their standard: self- determination.
In subsequent years, the principle of self-determination, which depended on non- interference in each other’s affairs and peaceful co-existence, was dreadfully abused. It became a smokescreen behind which some leaders of NAM member states systematically oppressed, dispossessed and massacred their own populations – often with the implied support of one or other of the major powers.
In recent years, the betrayal of NAM’s founding principles has been perhaps most marked in the cases of the three countries most involved in its formation: India, Indonesia and Yugoslavia.
India now has a Hindu chauvinist government with nuclear weapons aimed at Pakistan, its neighbour and fellow NAM member. Indonesia, under Suharto, became a brutal dictatorship which extended the benefits of a colonial administration to the less-than- grateful people of East Timor. And Yugoslavia has been ripped apart in an orgy of ethnic and religious bloodletting.
NAM’s agenda this time round in Durban includes disarmament, economic and social development, and reform of the United Nations – all issues that demand a ritual ra-ra, but none of which focuses on the supreme challenge before the poorer and smaller states in the world.
It is this: these states, their people and their leaders must take responsibility for where they are now, for the condition they are in, and how they plan to move forward. We are all big boys and girls now. Blame is a child’s game.
This entails, among other things, acknowledging unequivocally ties of accountability within and between countries. Not only do the people of a country need to be able to hold their governments accountable; neighbouring states need to be able to hold each other accountable for gross maltreatment of their own citizens.
NAM – like the Organisation of African Unity – loses all credibility if it wails against, say, perceived injustices in the international economic order while keeping silent about blatant iniquities within the borders of member states.
These are issues both Mbeki and Mandela have raised in the past. It is vital that they be given real force over the next week. Otherwise, NAM will continue to demand no serious attention at all. And the only deserving people to benefit from its summit in Durban will be those who did at my first NAM summit in Harare 12 years ago: the women, girls and boys who work as prostitutes.