Sunday Times 2
Is NAM struggling to be re-born?
View(s):By Thalif Deen
The concept of “non-alignment” gained political traction at the UN during the height of the Cold War which ended around 1989.
NAM leaders posing for the group photograph at the last NAM summit in Baku, Azerbaijan in 2019
When Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayewardene (JRJ) inherited the chairmanship in February 1978, he was sceptical of NAM– which was reputed to be politically independent, with no strong links to either of the world’s two superpowers, namely the US and the Soviet Union engaged in a longstanding Cold War.
In an interview with an American news reporter, JRJ downgraded the political myth about “non-alignment” when he infamously declared there were only two “non-aligned countries” in the world: the US and the Soviet Union.
All other countries, he argued, perhaps rightly so, were politically, militarily or economically aligned, either with the US or the Soviets.
And now a third country—the People’s Republic of China (PRC) described as the world’s second-largest economy after the US—has emerged as a new superpower.
A rising China also threatens to undermine the concept of non-alignment since several NAM countries, particularly in Asia and Africa, now depend heavily on economic and military aid from Beijing, politically aligning themselves with PRC.
The new development triggers the question: Is NAM still alive or is it struggling to be re-born — particularly at a time where a new Cold War is emerging at the United Nations —where veto-wielding permanent members, China and Russia, are aligning themselves against the US, UK and France?
The split has resulted in a deadlock over military conflicts and civil wars in Syria, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Yemen, and most recently Ukraine, and is also politically dividing UN member states.
Peter Stano, a spokesman for the European Union (EU), was quoted as saying last week, that South Africa, its largest trading partner and a former chairman of NAM in 1998, “is moving further away from a non-aligned position” and fast becoming a political and military ally of Russia.
But South African officials deny this, claiming they are still officially “non-aligned” in keeping with the principles of the Non-Aligned Movement, according to a report in the New York Times.
H.M.G.S. Palihakkara, a former Sri Lankan Ambassador to the United Nations in New York and Geneva, told IDN: “As far as I know, no government is trying to revive the old ‘Movement’ of Non-Aligned countries. But there is much talk about the ‘Idea’ of nonalignment and its refurbishing to handle the looming confrontation / Cold War in the Indo Pacific”
Some tend to confuse or conflate the ‘institution’ of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) with the ‘idea’ of non-alignment, he pointed out.
“This is too simplistic an attitude towards a dynamic conception. While the Movement or the institution of NAM suffered internal inertia and faded away with the ending of the Cold War, the idea of non-alignment lived on, dynamically creating space for emerging nations to pursue human/territorial security and economic prosperity,” he added.
Such Nations, he argued, cannot and need not suffer disadvantages or sanctions arising from perceptions about their being on the ‘wrong side’ of a given power rivalry, as they want to derive economic benefits from ‘all sides’.
“Non-alignment is not about distancing and meek diplomacy. It is about engagement and robust diplomacy”.
“The utility of this thinking comes into sharper focus in the context of the already ongoing power rivalry and looming confrontation that can lead to conflict in the ‘Indo-Pacific’, potentially endangering the abundance of prosperity Asia has registered and aggravating the paucity of security the continent has begun to perceive,” said Palihakkara, a former Foreign Secretary at the Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry.
Arul Louis, a UN correspondent for Indo-Asian News Service and a nonresident senior fellow with the New Delhi-based think tank, Society for Policy Studies, told IDN that while India had spoken about issues like debt or low growth, which affected a significant number of countries of the South, it did not face a debt problem and its economy was the fastest growing major economy according to the UN last month, at 6.7 percent and the IMF at 6.1 percent.
“It is, therefore, amplifying those issues to bolster its leadership position in the South. This gives it a certain credibility in the Global Voice of the South initiative as it will not appear to be speaking for its interests”.
He pointed out that NAM tended to be political with a tilt towards Russia, with countries like Cuba playing a leading role.
As recently as 2019, Venezuela was the head of NAM and hosted the 2016 summit, which failed
to get much participation at the heads of government or
state levels.
“With the end of the Cold War, nonalignment lost its meaning in a unipolar world,” he pointed out.
Currently under the leadership of Azerbaijan, it hasn’t had a resurgence, and it will be the turn of Uganda in December to try for a revival, which would be based on economic and development interests, he noted.
As a general rule, back in the 1960s and 70s, all 116 NAM countries voted in unison on General Assembly resolutions rarely breaking ranks.
In most instances, the various regional groups and coalitions—including the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Group of 77, the Latin American and Caribbean States, the African Union (AU) and the Western European and Others (WEOG) — took decisions behind closed doors ahead of voting.
But even though the “herd mentality” continues in most UN voting, there are rare occasions of an unscheduled vote taking delegates by surprise.
A Sri Lankan ambassador once recounted a message transmitted from his Foreign Ministry in Colombo – primarily directed at newly-arrived delegates which read, “If you are faced with an unscheduled surprise vote, and do not have any instructions from the Foreign Ministry, look to the right to see how Yugoslavia is voting and look to the left to see how India is voting. If both ambassadors are seen bolting from their seats, just follow them to the toilet” (“absent” from the seat and pretending to rush to the toilet was a political tactic to escape from an embarrassing recorded vote).
In September 1979, when Sri Lanka handed over the chairmanship of NAM to Cuba at a summit meeting in Havana, the Western world and the mainstream media never accepted the fact that a strong pro-Soviet ally like Havana could ever be a “non-aligned” country.
As a result, right throughout Cuba’s chairmanship of NAM (1979-1983), the New York Times, perhaps as part of its editorial policy, never wavered describing NAM as a “so-called Non-Aligned Movement” in every news story published in the paper. The “so-called” label was dropped only when India took over the chairmanship of NAM in 1983.
Meanwhile, long after the end of the Cold War, some of NAM’s political mandates remained valid, including nuclear disarmament, the right to self-determination, the protection of national sovereignty, and the elusive goal of a Palestinian homeland.
This article contains excerpts from a recently-released book* on the United Nations titled “No Comment–and Don’t Quote Me on that” available on Amazon: https://www.rodericgrigson.com/no-comment-by-thalif-deen/
(Thalif Deen, author of the book, is Editor-at-Large at the Berlin-based In-Depth News Service (IDN), an ex-UN staffer and a former member of the Sri Lanka delegation to the UN General Assembly sessions. A Fulbright scholar with a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Columbia University, New York, he shared the gold medal twice (2012-2013) for excellence in UN reporting awarded annually by the UN Correspondents Association)