First colonialism, then neocolonialism, and now globalisation -- it's all pretty much the same for the underdogs of the South, writes Gamal Nkrumah Where there is muck, there is brass, goes the old adage. Abject poverty, misery and human degradation on a gargantuan scale, illiteracy, ill- health and rampant socio-economic underdevelopment were the most critical of the crippling problems facing the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa in the 1950s. They banded together to combat neocolonial say-so. If ever a venerable international institution needed preservation, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) which leaders of the then nascent nation- states of Asia and Africa created was it. Those leaders who gathered in Bandung were a breed apart. They exuded an irresistible charisma that galvanised their long-suffering peoples. However, the larger-than-life leaders are long gone. But, the challenges they so valiantly strove to obliterate are still with us today. The filth and decay of rural backwaters in Africa, Asia and South and Central America are a grim reminder that little has changed since Bandung. The vast majority of the peoples of poor and indebted countries are still stuck in the mire of backwardness and underdevelopment. And lest we forget, the developing countries of the South are still treated like dirt today. The whole point of NAM was that the underdogs deserved better. Throughout modern history, the developing nations of Africa and Asia were subject to the dictates of their former colonial masters. Even after independence, metropolitan powers threatened the fledgling nations' sovereignty and territorial integrity. Egypt, for example, was subjected to the so-called Tripatriate Aggression, when it nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956. "Colonialism also has its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, and actual physical control by a small and alien community within a nation. It is a skilful and determined enemy and it appears in many guises," the late Indonesian President Sukarno who played host at the Bandung summit told the delegates who converged on the picturesque Javanese city in April 1955. Sukarno's portrayal of the pitfalls of neocolonialism has an unmistakably contemporary ring to it. "This is a prescient description of neocolonialism, and would accurately describe the occupation in Iraq and Palestine," the All India Peace and Solidarity Organisation (AIPSO) declared at a recently-held Cairo conference in commemoration of the Bandung legacy convened 1-3 March 2005. "The different countries within the Movement became under the control of the international financial capitalist institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The economic relations of these countries, individually or collectively, became more entrenched than their relations with one another," said Secretary General of the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO) Nouri Abdul-Razzak. The Secretary-General of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Association of Sri Lanka A A M Marleen concurred. "There were warnings from many quarters urging the US not to undertake any military adventure in Iraq," Marleen said at last week's Cairo conference. He reminded his listeners that the former United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix declared on 4 March 2003 that the war in Iraq was illegal and carried no legal justification since Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. "There were passionate pleas from political and religious leaders against the war," Marleen noted. "But all these pleas fell on the deaf ears of President [George W] Bush who was hell bent on implementing the designs of the corporate conglomerates that brought him to power," Marleen explained. The participants at the Cairo conference were commemorating an age when Third World solidarity changed global politics. "The end of the Cold War has not made the essence of non-alignment irrelevant," explained R N Srivastava, director of the Foundation for Peace and Sustainable Development (FPSD) of India. "The end of the Cold War has raised various hopes as well as possibilities of creating a new world order," Srivastava said. In the good old days, NAM was faced with the immediate problem of decolonisation. The peoples of Africa and Asia were enraptured with the idea of decolonisation and national self- determination. Today, half a century of national liberation and independence have generated a whole new set of challenges. The peoples of Africa are faced with the devastating spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis claim the lives of millions of people in Africa, largely because heavily indebted African countries cannot afford a decent health care system. Social ills breed social discontent and conflicts. It is a viscous circle that is extremely hard to get out of. "Simmering disputes, violent conflicts, aggression and foreign occupation, interference in the internal affairs of states, policies of hegemony and domination, ethnic strife, religious nationalism and transnational terrorism are, inter alia, major and dangerous obstacles to harmonious coexistence among states and peoples. They have even led to the disintegration of states and societies," Srivastava pointed out. This is an age where nothing is left to chance. The developing countries of the South must pool their resources in the fight against poverty, illiteracy and ill-health. Only by presenting a united front in international forums can they fight more effectively against unfair trade practices. "On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Bandung, it is important to have widespread discussions and debates about identifying the challenges the movement has to address in the wake of the dynamics of globalisation. NAM's role in promoting a just international order would depend largely on its inner strength, unity and cohesion," Srivastava said. "The fact remains that NAM has not lost its validity, since most of the problems faced by the developing nations during the Cold War era continue to persist," he concluded. Be that as it may, there was a consensus at the Cairo conference commemorating Bandung that we live in an entirely different world, far removed from the confines of the Cold War. "Fifty years after the historic Bandung conference we live in a much-changed world. The Soviet Union-led Socialist bloc no longer exists, nor does the Soviet Union itself," the All India Peace and Solidarity Organisation (AIPSO) representative at the Cairo conference said. "The US today is the sole superpower, with some of its leading politicians and ideologues planning, writing and propagating for a 'new American century'." Today the world is confronted with Pax Americana on a most insidious scale. All the more reason for the resuscitation of the ideals of Bandung. Those ideals are as vitally important as the guiding blueprint for Southern solidarity and cooperation. What we are left with is the confidence they have in its future and its value. "Now that bloc politics no longer exist, and decolonisation is almost complete, many in the North write off the Bandung conference at best as irrelevant history and at worst a an ill- conceived adventure that misguided the foreign policy of much of the South depriving them the benefits of Northern aid, trade and capital." Even so, at some level, "[i]t is rewarding to recall what the leaders of the five sponsoring countries said then in April 1955, to see how contemporary some of the key concerns in Bandung were," as AIPSO so aptly put it. Southern leaders pioneered the concept of South-South cooperation in Bandung. It was a courageous precedent. What is more, leftist forces in the West sympathised with the aspirations of the peoples of the South. In much the same vein, Adnan Hussein and Rabab Abdul-Hadi delivered an impassioned plea for the solidarity of oppressed peoples the world over at the Cairo conference. "The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed -- in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale," wrote African-American novelist and writer Richard Wright in his 1956 bombshell The Colour Curtain. "Who had thought of organising such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgement upon the Western world," Hussain and Abdul- Hadi quoted Wright. "Our principal interest in the legacy of Bandung is in the cultures of resistance and solidarity that developed [in its aftermath]. We are not claiming that a meeting of governments de facto produces emancipatory movements, but neither are we arguing that [Third World] governmental collaboration failed or was legitimate," Hussain and Abdul-Hadi explained. "The formal bodies and organisations were also a part of this story and complicate the context in which such cultures and solidarities were sustained," they noted. "There is the promise of working collectively that remains an ongoing legacy [of NAM]," Hussain and Abdul-Hadi emphasised. "The major dimension of Bandung's legacy that we wish to highlight is the opening of spaces which allow for the emergence of global cultures of resistance and solidarities among peoples."
