NEW YORK - When the first summit meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was held in the Yugolsav capital of Belgrade in September 1961, Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike was reported to have made an impassioned plea on behalf of the developing world's poorest and marginalized peoples.
The politically catchy sound bite in her speech ("Speaking as a mother and as a Prime Minister...") apparently resounded positively among delegates in the conference hall that day.
Fast forward to Cairo in October 1964 when Egypt's charismatic president Gamal Abdul Nasser was taking over the NAM chair from Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, two of the founding fathers of NAM, along with India's Jawaharlal Nehru.
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| Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama addressing the 15th NAM Ministerial Conference in Tehran July last year. Pic. courtesy the website of Sri Lanka’s embassy in Tehran. |
Ms. B's political advisers, huddled in a hotel room overlooking the pyramids and the ancient tombs of Egyptian pharaohs, were struggling to come up with an equally catchy phrase for her speech the next day.
Felix Dias Bandaranaike, Ms. B's nephew and one of her confidants with a vibrant sense of humour, is supposed to have turned to the Prime Minister and said jokingly: Why don't you start the speech by saying "Speaking as a mummy and as a Prime Minister...."
Ms. B apparently was not amused by Felix's suggestion. Or so the story goes. A great anecdote from the Cairo summit, if ever there was one -- at the expense of the thousand-year-old Egyptian mummies so hilariously portrayed in the 1955 Hollywood comedy "Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy."
Cut to Cairo again next week when President Hosni Mubarak takes over as the new chairman of NAM at a summit meeting scheduled to take place in the Red Sea coastal town of Sharm el-Sheikh July 15-16.
But the more troubling news for the United States and Western Europe will be the collective decision of the 119 political leaders - all of them from the developing world -- to anoint Iran as successor to Egypt in 2012.
"Who knows", says one Asian diplomat, "by then, Iran may well be the first nuclear power to chair NAM?"
The star-studded cast in Cairo next week will include the NAM Troika: Cuban President Raul Castro (outgoing chair), Mubarak (incoming chair) and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (next chair).
But the third world movement, which was founded during the height of the Soviet-U.S. confrontation in the mid 1950s, has been in danger of losing its political bearings in the post-Cold War environment. But is NAM still relevant in today's international environment?
"Yes, NAM is still relevant, if not as strong as it was," says Nihal Rodrigo, a former Secretary-General of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and a one-time NAM Coordinator under the 1976 chairmanship of Sri Lanka.
He pointed out that NAM came to life in the context of its principled response to, and indeed rejection of the bi-polar, ideology-based rivalry of the Cold War.
"NAM assumed a political personality of its own," Rodrigo said. "It survived the Cold War, outliving it".
Told that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), born out of the Cold War, has also continued to thrive despite the end of the Soviet-U.S. military confrontation, Rodrigo pointed out that NATO had adjusted its own agenda once the Cold War was over.
"Change is the only constant in history. The membership of NAM continued to increase even after the Cold War," said Rodrigo, a former Sri Lankan Ambassador to the United Nations.
When Cuba was elected NAM chair for the first time in 1979, the Western media ridiculed the Movement on the ground that Cuba was "fully aligned" with the then Soviet Union. As a matter of editorial policy, the New York Times continued to describe NAM as the "so-called" Non-Aligned Movement during Cuba's entire chairmanship through 1983.
Since NAM's creation in April 1955, its chairmanship has been rotating every three years among its third world members, including Algeria, Yugoslavia, South Africa, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Malaysia.
Cuba and Yugoslavia were the only two countries to hold the chair twice: 1979 and 2006, and 1961 and 1989 respectively. Egypt will be the third country to hold that distinction (first in 1964 and beginning next week through 2012).
An Asian diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, had a different take on NAM: "The fact that NAM was not even able to issue a statement or have a single paragraph on the recent missile testing by North Korea speaks volumes about the Movement".
He said the Security Council and everyone else was very concerned about what had happened in Pyongyang. Yet, NAM remained silent. With the end of the Cold War, he pointed out, NAM has been in a bit of a limbo.
"There are often deep divisions within NAM on most political and even economic issues. There are very few topics on which the NAM is truly united", he added.
He said the fact that the Group of 77 (a coalition of 130 developing countries) is in charge of economic issues has further contributed to NAM's marginalisation, especially on economic issues.
Rodrigo, who has written several essays on NAM, said the Movement is not committed to a single political or economic ideology. Most of its members have mixed economies and political structures also vary. "NAM has no means to enforce its decisions and this is a disadvantage in terms of the more influential role it can play."
However, he argued, it continues to build bridges across political differences and evolve consensual positions on issues to which the vast majority of nations could subscribe. He cited the situation in Sri Lanka following the defeat last May of the separatist terrorist organisation, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
He said NAM members, (and their strength in numbers), played a major role, in association with other sensible non-NAM countries, both in Geneva and New York, in resisting ill-conceived attempts by those who sought to unnecessarily pillory Sri Lanka which had virtually destroyed terrorism in toto.
Rodrigo said NAM stood united in supporting Sri Lanka's stand.
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