The Sunday Times Inside the Glass House

NEW YORK - When the fifth summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) took place in Colombo back in August 1976, the meeting was billed as the largest single gathering of over 100 world political leaders ever hosted by Sri Lanka.

The human resources of the Foreign Ministry were stretched to the maximum. The logistical problems were nightmarish -- perhaps equally taxing as the ordeal of handling an unprecedented 58 Sri Lankan delegates (with numbers rising by the hour) jetting into New York for next week's UN General Assembly sessions.

But the NAM summit in Colombo strained everyone -- officials, politicians, security personnel and peons -- to breaking point. Perhaps one of the legendary stories of the summit relates to Nihal Rodrigo, currently our Ambassador in Beijing and one of the Foreign Ministry's in-house experts on NAM, (and with whom I had the distinction of sharing a common balcony at the Marrs Hall dormitory at Peradeniya in the 1960s.)

As the summit was coming to a wearied end, Rodrigo collapsed through sheer exhaustion -- physical, not political. As he was being wheeled away in a stretcher, he uttered the now famous words: "Never mind me, but save the Movement." Both Rodrigo and the Non-Aligned Movement eventually survived that summit -- despite political squabbles over Afghanistan, Kampuchea and Palestine.

Since then, the future of NAM has remained shaky -- particularly in a unipolar world with a single superpower dominating the global political stage. When the Movement was launched in the early 1960s during the height of the Cold War, the Western world and the mainstream media were sceptical of its credibility because it was perceived as seemingly pro-Soviet and implicitly anti-U.S. in its approach to global politics.

In an interview with the New York Times, President J.R. Jayewardene, who chaired NAM during 1977-1979, perhaps unwittingly reflected a Western view when he remarked in 1979 that "there are only two truly non-aligned countries in the world: the United States and the Soviet Union." All other countries, he pointed out, are "aligned" either to the one or the other.

So when Cuba assumed the NAM chairmanship from Sri Lanka in September 1979, the New York Times laid down a strict editorial guideline in its coverage: that NAM under Cuba's leadership should always be described as "the so-called Non-Aligned Movement." And the reporters did. The Times refused to concede that Fidel Castro was the leader of a truly "non-aligned" country credible enough to lead the politically-diverse Movement -- even though one of the qualifications for NAM membership was the absence of foreign military bases or troops on native soil. Cuba had passed the test.

In September 1979, Sri Lanka handed over the chairmanship of NAM to Cuba at a summit meeting in Havana. The media team covering that summit was formidable and included Mervyn de Silva, S.P Amerasingham (editor of the now defunct Tribune), Rex de Silva, Jimmy Barucha and Eamon Kariyakarawan. A former editor of the Daily News and the Observer, Ernest Corea, was also present at that summit, but by then he had regretfully moved from journalism to diplomacy, and was in Havana in his capacity as Sri Lanka's High Commissioner to Canada (with concurrent accreditation to Cuba).

And next week, Cuba will once again take over the chairmanship of the 116-member NAM, with an ageing and ailing Castro still at the helm. But in the absence of any exceptionally strong Soviet (now Russian) political and military ties, Cuba may now be more acceptable to the West and the Western mainstream media.

Since NAM was primarily a creation of the Cold War era, some Western political analysts have argued that the Movement should have died when the Cold War ended in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. But an Asian diplomat at the UN rightly points out that no such drastic measure was envisaged for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), which was also a creation primarily of the Cold War. "If NAM has no reason to exist after the Cold War," he argues, "so should be the fate of NATO." But NATO, he says, has been strengthened, not diluted, since the end of the Cold War.

An 88-page NAM declaration is expected to be adopted at the close of the summit in the Cuban capital on September 15. The draft declaration, prepared primarily by Cuba and current chair Malaysia, covers a wide range of subjects, including political issues such as the Middle East peace process, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, along with social and economic issues such as trade, South-South cooperation, international migration, drug trafficking and corruption.

But the only subject that has triggered a political dispute is the Middle East -- primarily the recent invasion of Lebanon by Israel. Singapore, a longstanding member of NAM, has expressed strong reservations over what it calls an "unbalanced and one-sided view" of the Lebanon war. The draft expresses strong condemnation of the Israeli military aggression against Lebanon but fails to mention that the invasion was triggered by the actions of Hezbollah, including the abduction and kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers.

Ambassador Venu Gopal Menon of Singapore says that NAM is in danger of losing its credibility if it is not seen as being politically objective in its declaration. Menon told a meeting of NAM's Coordinating Bureau in New York last week: "We are sympathetic to the situation in Lebanon. We have been following closely and with deep concern the developments on the ground in Lebanon and have contributed in our own way to help the Lebanese people."

"So there is no question of my delegation's support for the rights of the Lebanese people. Equally, our support for the NAM and its principles and objectives is firm," he added. Menon also said the "issues before us are salient." NAM should have a view, he argued, "but this view has to be considered, objective, and reflect reality." However, he noted a "disturbing trend within the Non-Aligned Movement" -- that it seems less inclined to listen to the views of all its members, much less consider their proposals. "We tried repeatedly to propose amendments to the text. However, we were not allowed to do so," he added.