POLITICS-NONALIGNED: Name Change or Change in Dialogue?

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 15 1995 (IPS) - The future of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is up for grabs at its meeting this week in Cartegena, Colombia.

Even the movement’s outgoing chairman, Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas, admits the very word “non-aligned” raises more questions than answers in the post-Cold War world.

“Non-aligned to what?,” he asked in a recent interview.

“We may have to think of a name change,” he said of the movement whose membership has grown to 111 since it was founded in 1961 in the former Yugoslav capital of Belgrade.

Although a change of name is not on the agenda in Cartagena NAM has lost none of its passion for slugging it out with the West and the movement proposes to fight western attempts to impose a moratorium on all future U.N. conferences.

The heads of state gathering in Colombia for the triennial NAM summit Oct 19-21 will insist on two new conferences, one on international migration and the other on South-South cooperation.

The two proposed conferences, to be held after the 1995 Global Food Summit and the Habitat conference, are part of the demands set down in the final declaration to be adopted by NAM in Colombia.

The proposals, which will be pursued at the current session of the General Assembly just after the Cartagena summit, is bound to result in a North-South showdown at the United Nations.

The United States and the 15-member European Union (EU) insist that no new U.N. conferences should be held until the United Nations implements the decisions taken at previous conferences. U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright said last week the United States wants a United Nations “that talks less and produces more.”

Indonesia’s Ali Atalas pointed out that NAM was not a neutral organisation.

“We have never been neutralist and we never will,” he said. NAM’s position on several issues has sometimes been “on one side” and at other times “on the other side.”

“But our basic principles remain the same — whether in a bipolar world or a unipolar world. We want the right to make up our own minds,” Alatas said.

But the 60-page NAM declaration is implicitly critical of the West for most of the social and economic ills of the Third World.

The heads of state are also critical of the Bretton Woods institutions for failing to reach out and help the poor and the needy in developing nations.

“They (the heads of state) noted that the measures adopted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) through their various concessional mechanisms have proved insufficient against the requirements of development,” the declaration says.

The Movement also faults Western donors for failing to meet their commitment to allocate 0.7 percent of their gross national product (GNP) to official development assistance (ODA).

The commitment made at the General Assembly back in 1970 has been met only by four countries so far: Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Mahbub ul Haq, author of the UN’s annual Human Development Report, told IPS that NAM should change its strategy to keep up with the political realities of the post-Cold War era.

“My own feeling is the entire dialogue of the developing world has to change. They have to realise they are living in a different world altogether,” he said.

“I don’t think it is going to help them very much to continue their dialogue on the 0.7 percent target, on trade preferences and on commodity price stabilisation. These are all issues of the 1970s,” he said.

Haq argues that the issues of tomorrow are different – participation in trade opportunities, foreign investments and global commons.

“I think if the developing nations of NAM are smart, they will take the logic of the marketplace back to the rich nations,” he said. “They will ask them: why is it that you are exploiting the global commons to your advantage. Is it the right of rich nations to create 80 percent of global pollution without having to pay for it.”

If the principle of “pollution pays” is accepted – and environmental permits are traded — the rich nations will end up paying about five percent of their GNP to poor nations.

This could really mean about 800 billion dollars per year. “And so you can forget the 50 billion dollars a year which comes as ODA (official development assistance),” Haq added.

“This is not charity, this is an entitlement.”

The developing countries have also been very slow in demanding that rich nations open up their economies.

According to a recent study by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 22 of the 24 OECD members have become more protectionist.

“This is an argument that NAM and the Group of 77 developing nations should be taking up with Western nations,” he said.

The Human Development Report says that developing nations lose about 200 bilion dollars annually because of protectionism by rich nations. “This is four times the ODA allocation, “Haq said.

“Developing countries are still stuck in a dialogue of the past in a world that has passed them by. They are still arguing for charity when they should be demanding their entitlements.”