The Hindu Business Line : <I>`Dead force'? </I>

Time alone can tell whether the exertions of leaders of 118 nations in Havana to breathe new life into the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) will result in anything tangible. Conceived by the trio of Jawaharlal Nehru, Josip Broz Tito and Gamel Abdel Nasser, it was meant to help its members to look at issues on merits without being subjected to the pulls and pressures of the American and Soviet blocs dominating the world during the Cold War years.

Even at that time, there were those like the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who considered it wrong and `immoral' of the Movement to seek to be `non-aligned' between good (the US) and evil (the USSR). Anyway, the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union put paid to whatever justification or relevance it had, and many had written it off as a `dead force'.

It is difficult to put a finger on the precise achievements of the recent Havana confabulations. Of course, it gave an opportunity to the prime movers — Cuba and Venezuela — and US-baiters of their ilk, to regale the assemblage with some venomous anti-US rhetoric, taunting the super-power that the label of "axis of evil" it attached to regimes which were anathema to it now covered 118 nations.

Other than the pyrotechnical display of this kind, the conclave has produced very thin gruel indeed. It could not be otherwise. The participating countries represented an almost unbridgeable divide in world-view, stages and pace of development, forms of government and access to resources. The economies of most of them are fragile and are dependent on handouts by the US and other industrial countries. It is futile to expect this motley group to take any assertive, let alone aggressive and united, stance on any matter of moment under the guise of being `non-aligned'. No wonder, then, that the Havana gathering confined itself to safe generalities such as condemnation of terrorism, call for eradication of poverty and establishment of a more equitable world order.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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