Few noticed it but this month marked the 50th anniversary of the first Bandung Conference (April 18-25, 1955), and the birth of the nonaligned movement. Initially, the Indonesian government wanted to mark the occasion with special ceremonies in the Javanese resort where the conference was held. But the plan was axed as part of budgetary savings imposed by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Although half a century is not long enough to assess all the implications of a major historic event, it offers an opportunity for an interim balance sheet.
As a diplomatic initiative, Bandung was a spectacular success. The idea originally came from the Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) government in 1954 with support from the Philippines.
At first the two governments envisaged a conference limited to Asian nations. Indonesia’s President Ahmad Sukarno, who offered to host the conference, expanded the idea beyond Asia, a move that would strengthen his position with the presence of Arab and Islamic nations from the Middle East and North Africa.
The idea soon produced the domino effect.
Burma’s Prime Minister U Nu and his Chinese counterpart Chou En-lai agreed to attend followed by North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh. Next it was the turn of Japan to announce its participation. By the time the conference was convened it had attracted three other stars: Egypt’s President Gamal Abdul-Nasser, Kwame N’Krumah , then prime minister of the Gold Coast (later renamed Ghana), and Adam Clayton Powell, a black Congressman from Harlem, New York.
The conference convened with 29 full members and observers.
Six years later, the nonaligned movement was born with 77 members, reaching a peak with over 120 members toward the end of the 20th century.
In a sense, Bandung was a child of the Conference of the Oppressed Peoples held in Brussels in 1927 with the aim of implementing the Wilsonian doctrine of self-determination for colonized nations across the globe.
Unlike the Brussels conference that represented a people-based movement, however, Bandung was a gathering of largely undemocratic states dominated by charismatic autocrats.
A re-reading of the speeches made at the conference shows that the participants were, in fact, talking at rather than to each other.
They spoke of fostering a new sense of human unity and solidarity but, in fact, introduced new dividing lines.
Chou En-lai beat the drums of a pan-Asian coalition that would presumably be dominated by Communist China.
Nasser had his dream of pan-Arabism that would make Egypt the leader of an empire extending from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.
N’Krumah promoted his pan-African agenda.
Congressman Clayton Powell, who did not head any government, had his own dream: Uniting the “colored” mankind under a single banner. Although the conference included people from different shades of color, Clayton Powell insisted on seeing all as “black”, and thus heir to the capital of suffering left by centuries of slavery and oppression. All those fanciful ideas were to fail in time.
Chou En-lai’s idea that geography alone could unite nations as diverse as Japan and Afghanistan, passing by China and India, ignored the facts of history, religion, and politics. Nasser’s pan-Arabism put the emphasis on language while the monism offered by N’Krumah was based on geography. Clayton Powell, for his part, saw the color of skin as a sufficient unifying factor, thus unwittingly endorsing the prejudices of racism. “ A wall of color separates us from the white oppressors,” he mused.
Because this was a gathering largely of autocrats, Bandung became a spectacle of will as politics. Boutros Boutros-Ghali calls it “a bazaar of illusions.” The participants thought that it was enough to want something for it to become reality. They were soon to be disappointed.
In his speech, Sukarno depicted the prospect of thermonuclear war between the Western and the Soviet blocs, and spoke of a world of fear.
Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru also harped on the theme of war between the two blocs, while launching the idea of an unaligned, later to be called nonaligned, bloc to provide a zone of peace in the world.
In the decades that followed, however, the nonaligned nations became responsible for most of the wars in the world. Months after Bandung India invaded Pakistan in the hope of annexing part of the Ran-e-Kuch salient. China attacked India and captured large chunks of territory, including part of Ladakh in 1960. In 1961 it was the turn of India to invade the Portuguese enclave of Goa. India also fought border wars with Burma, later renamed Myanmar, while Nasser led the Arab states into a disastrous war with Israel in 1967. Over the following three decades members of the nonaligned movement were involved in 67 wars, including the eight-year long Iran-Iraq war, the deadliest in the world since 1945. In the 1970s Indonesia, the host country, experienced a civil war in which at least half a million people perished.
The expected nuclear showdown between the Western and Soviet blocs, however, did not materialize. Instead, the West and the USSR fought proxy wars using members of the so-called nonaligned movement as surrogates.
Over time the nonaligned movement became a stage on which despots of all description sought a measure of undeserved legitimacy.
One of the first despots to join was Marshall Josip Broz Tito who headed a Communist miniempire in Yugoslavia. Others included Guinea’s Ahmad Sekou-Toure, Central Africa’s “Emperor” Jean-Bedel Bokassa, Uganda’s Idi Amin, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, Algeria’s Houari Boumedienne, and, later, Iraq’ Saddam Hussein, and Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic.
Bandung was also the birthplace of an ideological industry, soon taken over by the French intellectuals, which was to produce a cluster of weird doctrines known under the label Third Worldism (tiermondisme in French).
Jean-Paul Sartre, the centenary of whose birth coincides with Bandung’s golden jubilee, invented his doctrine of “liberation from the peripheries” which saw the peasants of the Third World rising in revolt to liberate their countries, and then marching on to bring freedom to the West as well. Writing in 1961, Sartre promised that the global peasant revolt would be socialist and internationalist. What the French philosopher did not know, however, was that, thanks to technological progress, the peasant class would disappear in many countries.
Sartre advised the Third World to steer clear of such ideas as democracy, pluralism and voting. He saw elections as “the rape of society” by a small group of politicians, and, in later years when he was fascinated by the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, advocated perpetual revolt that would not allow for stable government let alone economic development.
Frantz Fanon, a black French philosopher who later converted to Islam, took the concept of blackness, “negritude”, developed by Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor, beyond the limits of the absurd. He insisted that anyone who was not at least partly black had a “Hitler hidden in him.” What Fanon did now know was that most ordinary Arabs, including Algerians whom he regarded as his new compatriots, did not consider themselves as blacks and could be as racist as any European.
What is left of Bandung 50 years later?
The blocs have disappeared, and Third World despots can no longer play the capitalist West against the Communist East to maintain their hold on power. Capitalism has triumphed almost everywhere, including in such remaining Communist heartlands as China and Vietnam. Sartre’s global peasant revolt sounds like a Paris cafe joke rather than serious philosophy. Everywhere, people want pluralism, elections, and prosperity — all the tings that the Third Worldists regard as decadent, bourgeois, and imperialist concoctions.
