The Shield of Non-Alignment
Editorial
Stabroek News
February 19, 2003
This weekend the thirteenth Summit Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) will open in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. As is customary, the host government, Malaysia has sent an Emissary to Georgetown to convey the personal invitation of his Prime Minister and to stimulate interest. However in contrast to earlier times when Non-Alignment loomed large in Guyana’s Foreign Policy and when in consequence there was high public awareness of preparations for Guyana’s participation in a forthcoming summit, this time there has hardly been a murmur.
There are several reasons for this situation of apparent disinterest. One is the belief that with the ending of the cold war and the disappearance of the Blocs there is no point to being non-aligned. And indeed it is true that the NAM was founded as a response to a bi-polar world in which the super powers vied to ensure that the new states lined up with one bloc or the other - a situation perhaps not dissimilar to President Bush’s “you are either with me or you are against me”. Cherishing their independence which had been so recently won from the colonial regimes the leaders of the new states sought through the solidarity of the NAM to escape bloc entanglements, in short to maintain a position of not being aligned with one side or the other. But the main thrust of the movement had never been to maintain that posture but instead to safeguard their national independence. However, the name remains, as happens in the case of a small boy who is nicknamed “Tiny” and is still called by that name after he has grown into a six footer.
Since its foundation in 1961, this dominant concern of the NAM with the maintenance of independence has been expressed in a huge range of forms and initiatives including the strengthening of the United Nations (UN), the acceleration of the struggle for decolonisation, the re-structuring of the world economy so that it supported the economic development of the developing states, disarmament to secure peace and the release of resources for development and the democratisation of international relations.
It is nevertheless true that the NAM has lost some of its political momentum as it has failed to come to grips adequately with important aspects of the rapidly evolving international reality. The NAM now desperately needs a re-invigorated agenda.
However there were often other domestic reasons for Guyana’s cutback on NAM as an important pillar of its foreign policy. It appears that there was an unfortunate misreading of its role in Guyana’s foreign policy. The effective participation of Guyana in numerous NAM groups and meetings and the leadership role which Guyana came to play in such issue-areas as economic cooperation among developing countries and Southern African independence struggles was unwisely seen as incurring unnecessary expenditure whose sole purpose was the aggrandisement of the international stature of the head of government, the foreign minister and others then involved. What was lost on such a superficial analysis was that the leadership, often vanguard role of Guyana ensured the solidarity of all the Afro-Asian and other states with Guyana in its struggle to maintain its territorial integrity. This is no figment of the imagination. It is a well attested fact that when Venezuela sent a Mission to Africa to build diplomatic bridges with those states, the Venezuelans were firmly told “yes, we would be willing to be friends with Venezuela but you must first get off the back of Guyana.”
Guyana is paying a high price for abandoning its activist leadership stature. The renewal of Venezuelan threats has deterred investment from the resource rich Essequibo region, while on the other side there is, in the precise meaning of the saying, plain “eyepass” in which Suriname has made rings around Guyana as during the Presidential visit to Paramaribo and more recently at the meeting of the Joint Commission whose communiqué after several months is still awaited! We are nevertheless from time to time treated to the non-stop litany of committees meeting on this and that.
In passing it is worth emphasising as sugar producers are finding out in the case of threats to the sugar market and as the rum producers demonstrated successfully, effective external representation of Guyana’s vital interests requires not lavish but a minimum essential expenditure. One minister or official going off alone to a major international or regional conference is not a true measure of economy. Such conferences as presently organised require a certain minimum of diplomats and other officials who will go into the committees and drafting groups to ensure the acceptance, in terms of Guyana’s vital interests, of supportive language and mechanisms. No minister could easily do that without being made to feel singular. Mere attendance is not the representation of interests.
But to return to the NAM. The international situation is ripe for the urgent resurgence of the NAM. Some scholars had predicted that the uni-polar world which emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union would, like its Roman predecessor, be characterised by the promulgation and observance of laws. Instead the world is witnessing the turning away from international law and of established norms, in the formulation of which the NAM had played a role. The UN is being sidelined with the threat of demolition of some of its agencies. Re-colonisation is being advanced through the imposition of WTO rules and military pressure. And terrorism flourishes within the ensuing disorder. Malaysia is the appropriate setting in which the revival of NAM could occur. The genesis of ideas and the energies which shaped the NAM came from the same East Asian region through the famous Afro-Asian conference which was held in 1955 in Bandung in Indonesia, a neighbour of Malaysia.
Moreover it is in East Asia that important steps have been taken to build new financial architecture which might free the region from the heavy hand of the IMF. The Asian grouping, ASEAN + 3 (China, Japan and South Korea), a grouping first envisaged by Dr. Mahathir the Prime Minsiter of Malaysia, have initiated a region-wide system of currency swaps designed to help them deal with future monetary crises - thus laying the ground work for an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF). On the trade side, there are initiatives to link existing free trade areas into a Free Trade Area covering the whole of East Asia which would be the most populous in the world.
The objective of these East Asian developments is not to build institutions separate from the existing international institutions but to ensure that regional states are not wholly dependant upon them as was the case during the East Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. It was that crisis which was the single most important catalyst for the planning of the more self-sufficient policies noted above. It was Dr. Mahathir, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, who during that crisis refused to accept the regimen imposed by the IMF as a condition for assistance. In order to protect Malaysia’s currency and to cut the flight of foreign capital he initiated wide ranging policy reforms including exchange controls. Malaysia’s remarkable recovery without IMF assistance has since led to grudging acceptance by most IMF analysts of Mahathir’s policies as correct and justified.
A few weeks ago at the World Economic Forum Dr. Mahathir likewise took a strong line on the war with Iraq. He asserted that public sentiment around the world had turned sharply against the US over its handling of Iraq. He pointed out that the level of trust of the US had reached a very low level. Mahathir had been one of Bush’s strongest supporters in the war against terrorism. Moreover, as he was reminded at Davos by the Chairman of a US corporation, the current prosperity of Malaysia is largely built on US semi- conductor factories and other US investments.
Dr. Mahathir has thus shown the courage and vision to pursue independent policies which advance his country’s national interests. He could be the leader which the NAM needs as it seeks to deal with a much changed international system.
In this connection a relevant agenda for the deliberation in Kuala Lumpur might include, inter alia the following:
(1) This summit is meeting, like the NAM foundation conference in Belgrade in 1961, at a time of worsening international crisis. The Belgrade Summit decided to intervene directly by sending emissaries namely Dr. Nkrumah and Nehru to speak respectively to Kennedy and Khruschev. At Kuala Lumpur, the NAM might consider similar action by sending at once Missions to Washington and Baghdad to try to defuse the imminent threat of war.
(2) NAM could take steps to recover its once dominant role in the UN General Assembly (UNGA). It is indeed passing strange that there has been in recent times so little significant action by NAM in the UNGA. There is the important precedent that at the time of the earlier Korean crisis and when there was deadlock among the veto powers in the Security Council, the UNGA had broken the impasse with the famous Uniting for Peace Resolution. Action in the UNGA could provide valuable support for Secretary General Kofi Annan in his now “lonely” role of dealing with the five permanent members of the Security Council who increasingly appear to function as a dominant entity, separate from the UN.
(3) The NAM could try to restore the concern with economic development to the international agenda where it has been currently sidelined by poverty alleviation, a subtle strategy which has been devised to soothe consciences while deflecting attention from the diminishing flow of economic assistance. In this refocus on economic development external trade will be seen as only one but an important instrument in furthering development.
Perhaps the most powerful think-tank in the developing world, The Third World Network, even more so than the South Secretariat in Geneva, is located in Malaysia. It would be surprising if its distinguished director Martin Klor has not put forward proposals for revitalising the summit agenda.
At a crucial stage in the development of the NAM when it appeared to have lost its momentum, the Georgetown conference of NAM Foreign Ministers in 1972 revitalised the movement by providing it with an enhanced agenda and a new direction. At this time of a crisis which threatens the fabric of the international order, the coming summit under the chairmanship of Dr. Mahathir is called upon to perform a similar function of revitalisation.
