Evoking memories of the heyday of the anti-colonial movement, the golden anniversary of the Bandung Summit is commemorated with greater fanfare than expected, writes Mohamed Sid-Ahmed Nearly half a century ago to the day, a summit meeting was held in a small Indonesian town. The choice of venue was unusual, as world leaders at the time usually chose to meet in urban centres with well-tried conference facilities. The name of the remote Asian town which hosted the event has gone down in history as a symbol of the emancipation of colonised peoples whose leaders came together to lay down a set of principles that we now take for granted but which were groundbreaking at the time. These leaders, who came from different political backgrounds, made the principles of independence, self- determination and anti-imperialism an integral part of the political discourse of the second half of the 20th century. The name of the town that hosted the first Afro-Asian summit is, of course, Bandung, and we are today marking the 50th anniversary of the historic meeting which launched a new kind of politics and signalled that the impact of WWII was not confined to Europe alone, but that it extended to Asia and Africa as well. It laid the foundations for what was first described as "Positive Neutralism" and, later, as the "Non-Aligned Movement". WWII came to an end with the defeat of Nazism and the breakdown of Japanese militarism. Its end brought about the disruption of the wartime alliance between the USA and the USSR and the onset of the Cold War. Although Bandung is best known for launching a new political dynamic, it also provided a venue for the establishment of new relationships with long-term implications. Once such relationship was the one forged between Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Chou-en-Lai, who had their first face-to-face meeting at Bandung. Abdel- Nasser had not previously developed close relations with any communist leader, nor had the communist countries established close relations with non-communist political figures. In fact, it was not until 16 May 1956, 13 months after Bandung, that Cairo recognised the People's Republic of China and established diplomatic relations with that country. At the time, Egypt was trying to buy arms from the United States. But President Eisenhower, urged by his wartime ally, Winston Churchill, not to furnish Egypt with weapons that would be used against British Tommies who had fought under Eisenhower's command in WWII, reneged on his promise to supply Egypt with arms. Chou-en-Lai promised Abdel-Nasser that he would speak to the Soviets to see if they could furnish weapons to Egypt. His mediation on Egypt's behalf led to the Czech arms deal, which was the point of departure for the Soviet Union's policy to supply weapons to Egypt. Possibly what clinched the deal was the World Bank's refusal to finance Abdel- Nasser's High Dam project. The Soviets declared their readiness to undertake the enterprise, and actually proceeded to do so despite an acrimonious war of words that erupted between Abdel-Nasser and the Soviets after the former accused Khrushtchev of supporting the new leader of the Iraqi Revolution, Abdul-Karim Qassem, considered to be particularly close to the Iraqi Communists, at Egypt's expense. The construction of the dam had an important role in dissipating tensions between Moscow and Cairo. On the occasion of its inauguration, Khrushtchev received a hero's welcome in Egypt. All Egyptian yacht docked in Alexandria. This was the high point of Egyptian-Soviet relations. However, the consolidation of Soviet- Egyptian relations in the spirit of Bandung did not give priority to the local Egyptian Communist movement over the Soviet leadership's relations with the Egyptian leadership. Tensions between Abdel-Nasser and Khrushtchev had reached a critical peak in the wake of the success of Iraq's 1968 Revolution. But the reconciliation over the High Dam demonstrated that state-to-state relations with prominent Third World countries had acquired precedence over ideological differences. However, tensions in Egyptian-Soviet relations rose anew following Egypt's defeat in the 1967 War, even though both sides insisted in public utterances that things remained at their best. In an attempt to revive the reformist spirit of the original Bandung Summit, leaders of 90 African and Asian nations met in Bandung last week to mark the anniversary of the historic event and to sign the "New Asian- African Strategic Partnership Accord". But can the spirit of Bandung be revised in the context of a new and very different world order from the one that prevailed in 1955? The breakdown of the Soviet Union and the replacement of the bipolar world order by a unipolar order headed by the United States, which is militarily more powerful than all other world powers combined, has created a situation in which there is no room for non- alignment. Today, any state has only one of two options: either to be with the United States or against it. Can this dismal situation be changed? Can states opt for a "third way" at a time the most prominent contradiction worldwide is no longer between East and West but between North and South? One can, of course, imagine a society with no rich people but it is far harder to imagine a society with no poor people. In other words, there are always elements of the South in the North, but not vice-versa. This obviously makes for an asymmetrical situation. How can Non-Alignment exist in such a unipolar world? As we have just highlighted, it cannot be assumed that all people in a society can be assimilated in the North. Bandung, which is identified with the South, underscores that the representatives of the South fight on to survive and cannot be eliminated easily. One advantage of identifying with the South is to depend on oneself, to oppose depending on others, a phenomenon now widespread with the diffusion of inter-dependence and globalisation, ultimately, to become self-reliant.
