Global tensions, UN reforms, top of NAM summit agenda

The in-tray for this year’s summit contains an imposing to-do list, notably geopolitical tensions from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, development, social and human rights issues from climate change to transnational crime, and a push for inclusive multilateralism including pushing for UN reforms.

Discussions by NAM countries will also feed into the seven-point themed Summit for the Future, scheduled for later in September, to discuss the direction of the world.

The NAM chair rotates among member states—two in Europe, 26 in Latin America and the Caribbean, 39 in Asia, and 53 in Africa. There are also 17 observer countries including Costa Rica, Argentina, Paraguay, Kazakhstan, and Serbia. 

Uganda joins Egypt, Zimbabwe, Algeria, and Zambia to have hosted the summit in Africa.
NAM, as an idea, was first mooted in April 1955 at the Afro-Asia solidarity summit in Bundung, Indonesia.

The Bundung conference convened by Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and Myanmar (then Burma), sought to initiate working together among countries in Southeast Asia and Africa then fighting against colonialism.

This, translated into the first summit in Belgrade, the capital of then Yugoslavia, in 1961 convened by Yugoslav president Josip Tito, India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser, proclaiming non-alignment as a foreign policy of allying neither with the US nor USSR.

Yugoslavia—which was split into six successor states, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia in the early 1990s following a long spell of in-fighting—had broken away from USSR, while India and Egypt wrestled for independence from Britain.

Twenty-five heads of government from Asia and Africa attended the meeting including Ghana’s Kwame Nkurumah, Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie, Indonesia’s Surkano, and Mali’s Madibo Keita.

The US, then at crossroads of supporting the decolonisation efforts in Africa and Asia while in cahoots with the European colonial powers to deter spread of communism, and also contending with a civil rights movement at home, initially viewed the Bandung conference and the non-aligned movement  altogether, with suspicion.

Observers in Washington, according to the US Department of State’s office history, expressed concern that the meeting was a sign of a leftward shift in the ideological leanings of the newly independent nations.

“In the end, however, the Bandung conference did not lead to a general denunciation of the West as US observers had feared. It gave a voice to emerging nations and demonstrated that they could be a force in future world politics, inside or outside the Cold War framework,” the State Department notes.

However, the seeds of suspicion had been laid on fertile grounds as the events of the following years show.

President Nkurumah, according to a research paper titled “The Vietnam War in Africa,” by Dan Hodgkinson of University of Oxford, UK, and Luke Melchiorre at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, had earlier in 1945, together with other African leaders, stirred a continent-wide anti-colonial agenda at the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester and six years later, became the prime minister of Ghana.

Reality check
After independence in 1957, Nkurumah embarked on “an ambitious, far-reaching project of decolonisation” which saw him start cozying up with the USSR, which supported several anti-colonial movements across the world.

USSR, then under Nikita Khrushchev, had begun taking “the Third World more seriously, establishing relationships with emergent, decolonising countries and driving new initiatives to theorise non-capitalist development and agrarian reforms.”

Across the Atlantic in Washington, John F Kennedy, who took the mantle in January 1961, made the Third World his agenda “as a way to move on from a high-stakes nuclear brinkmanship strategy pursued by his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower.”

“At the core of non-alignment was the belief that the Third World could be a revolutionary force in remaking a more just geopolitical order. Yet this did not mean African member states adhered around a single vision of non-aligned world making,” the paper notes.

It, however, also emerged that most radical African advocates of non-alignment “tended to be those leaders who were most ideologically committed to socialism, pan-Africanism, and Third World internationalism” hence the machinations by the US and its European allies to get rid of them through putsches and replaced by pro-Western governments, and assassinations.

“They believed that their efforts to enact revolutionary or socialist transformation domestically required an equally strong commitment to anti-colonial world making abroad, which made them some of the most enthusiastic supporters and hosts to the African liberation movements.”

Algeria’s Ben Bella was toppled in 1965, Nkurumah in 1966 while on a state visit to China, Keita in 1968 as was Uganda’s Milton Obote in 1970 while on a trip to Singapore while Zaire’s Patrice Lumumba was in 1961 killed and his body was never found.

Only a few staunch supporters of pan-Africanism and non-alignment such as Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere and Zambia’s Kenneth Kauda survived but not without sabotage.

“...the forced removal from power of many of the leading lights of Pan-African non-alignment caused post-colonial Africa to enter a period of “reversal and retrenchment,” where “most African freedom dreamers [now] understood the inevitability of the nation-state and the entrenchment of a world order in which they had to face either east or west.”

By contrast, Western-aligned African regimes like Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya, the espousal of non-aligned rhetoric frequently did not square with their pro-Western foreign policy.  

Elsewhere, barely one year after attending the Belgrade summit, India’s Nehru turned to the US for military wherewithal when his country went to war with China while his successor, the first female prime minister Indira Ghandi went to bed with USSR. In Egypt, Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat abandoned the USSR for the US. The list of leaders switching sides is long.

By the early 1980s, with many obdurate leaders of the now independent states of Africa and Asia no more, NAM had run out of steam. With the Cold War climaxing, the Ronald Reagan administration in Washington conceived a blueprint—the Reagan Doctrine—which included extending financial and military support to guerilla groups around the world seeking to remove socialist governments.

President Museveni, who waged war against the Obote II government in 1981 professing Marxist ideals, immediately made a U-turn and warmed up to the West and has remained their darling since. According to the book, Combatants: A memoir of the Bush war and press in Uganda, by William Pike, the former editor-in-chief of New Vision, Museveni occasionally sought support from the West to fight Obote.

As such, over time, diverse views have abounded about the existence and relevance of the non-alignment principle in the ideal world. Some pundits have opined that non-alignment is dead as many developing countries are still sucklings of the West, with foreign aid as the carrot, through Bretton Woods institutions--World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

International fallacy
The former Libyan strongman Muamar Gaddafi, who was bombed out of power in 2011 by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) coalition sending quivers among his contemporaries long grumbling about the West’s interference in African affairs, is quoted as famously describing NAM as “a funny movement of international fallacy”.

The voting in 2021 and 2022 at the UN General Assembly, the world’s parliament, called by US and its European allies to reprimand Russia for invading its former socialist neighbour-Ukraine, put the principle of non-alignment to the test in recent times: displaying how especially African countries are still under sway of the West.

“Actually, that brought back NAM discussions back to the table, because these are contending issues; there are two sides. We are not oblivious to what is going on but by taking sides do you help the situation?” argued Uganda’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Adonia Ayebare in an interview with Monitor in New York.

During all votes, Uganda voted “abstain” which the Kampala establishment maintains is a form of neutrality in a conflict that bears all ingredients of another US/Nato-Russia grudge match. African countries that voted to abstain continue to call for a peaceful solution to end the conflict.

The Russian Ambassador to Uganda, Vladlen Semivolos, told this publication in an interview last March that Moscow is cognizant of the pressure exerted by the West on Uganda and the likes to “vote that way.”

“We understand the African countries that voted against us and are very thankful for the objective position taken by other countries like Uganda and we respect that position,” Ambassador Semivolos said.

Since its founding 79 years ago, after World War II, as the anchor of a new global order— multilateralism, that requires countries to follow international norms and principles and pay respect to international institutions— there is a general consensus that both the UN and the system require rethinking in light of new dynamics such as the emergence of new powers, and the West—the US and its European allies—continuing to act unilaterally to protect their interests.

The UN was specifically established to prevent another world war but with tensions simmering in every corner of the world and the West continuously riding roughshod when it suits them and hiding behind the cover of international norms when it doesn’t, fears abound that a large-scale war is not a matter of if, but when.

The forever smouldering Middle East is currently in the ignition of a broader war, fueled by Israel’s poundage of Gaza, which all parties involved say are trying to avoid, but the events unfolding on the ground suggest otherwise.

The tensions flared last October when Israel launched a vicious retaliatory campaign to “demolish” the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) following its surprise attack on a music festival, south of the country, killing 1,139 people, injuring scores, and took more than 200 as hostage.

Four months down the road, the scale of the reprisals is a devastating horror—of at least 22,185 Palestinians killed as of January 2. About 70 percent of them are believed to be women and children, and up to 7,000 people missing, with many presumed to be buried under the rubble from the carpet bombings, according to the UN.

Yet, Palestine is recognised by NAM as an independent state and its quest for full autonomy, through the application of the two-state solution which was conceptualised in 1993 but has largely remained on paper, has been on top of agenda of past NAM summits.

It’s complicated
The last NAM summit held in the Azerbaijan capital, Baku, in October 2019 “regretted the persistent deadlock in the peace process and the absence of a credible political horizon to bring an end to the illegal Israeli military occupation of the land of the State of Palestine, including east Jerusalem, and achieve the inalienable rights and legitimate national aspirations of the Palestinian people, including to self-determination and freedom.”

As Israel continues its relentless bombardment of Gaza, NAM countries have voted overwhelmingly at the UN General Assembly for a ceasefire but individually, the majority have remained tight lipped.
Only seven NAM countries, South Africa, Chile, Colombia, Belize, Bahrain, Jordan, and Chad have either severed diplomatic relations or recalled their ambassadors as a show of protest against Israel altogether. Other NAM members which have done the same include Honduras and Turkey.

On December 29, South Africa went a step further dragging Israel to the Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of genocide against Palestinians.  The Israeli Foreign Affairs ministry called the suit a “blood libel.”

“No, no, no, we are not quiet in any way. What is going on is terrible on both sides, and one the principles of NAM is to defend the interests of Palestine to ensure it’s an independent state, Ambassador Ayebare defended.

The African Union, the grouping of 54 African countries, issued a statement in mid-October calling for a ceasefire and reiterating the two-state as the only way forward. Of the 44 countries that recognise the state of Israel, 30 maintain diplomatic missions in Tel Aviv.  Others like Uganda are conflicted parties for they maintain strong defence and military relations with Israel and are executive clients for arms supply and related technology including spyware.

The Arab League, the alliance of 22 Arab states in north and east Africa and the Arabian Peninsula established to safeguard the interests of Arab states, has largely remained quiet as key member states are under the spell of (the recent) normalisation of relations with Israel, which comes with perks including being viewed favourably by the West.  Among the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the collective voice of the Muslim world, only a handful of members such as Iran, Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, have come out strongly to condemn Israel.

“The unconditional support by Western states to Israel has laid bare the double standards of Western nations; the creation of a system where some countries are above others,” one international relations don opined during a closed-door dialogue hosted by Uganda’s Council of Foreign Relations and the Nordic Africa Institute in Kampala on November 14.

Notwithstanding, Ambassador Ayebare held that NAM remains relevant—perhaps more than ever—as a collective voice for developing countries.

“Despite its dysfunction, it has persisted; inter-state relations are not easy, countries don’t like to be told what to do; they don’t like strong institutions which constrain action.

“These institutions that bring countries together are really complex processes. That is why NAM is deliberately not institutionalised; it doesn’t have a secretariat nor headquarters. The idea was, as a forum where countries are in charge of their affairs, make it simple and easy,” he said.

He added: “NAM is different and countries cannot be expelled over this and that such as coups. In instances like wars, countries will pronounce themselves against the matter for internal processes for as long as there is consensus that is perceived to be the business of member countries. NAM also doesn’t want to be like Nato in that an attack on one is an attack on all; it is expressing solidarity within the means.”

The hibernation of NAM—as a collective voice—partly orchestrated by machinations of the West which installed fear among leaders of the developing world, paved way for the rise of several movements from Pan Africanism, the idea that people of African descent have common interests and should be unified, Pan-Asianism, and Pan Arabism that have also not adequately filled the void.

Ambassador Ayebare said: “NAM is all-encompassing, and now the idea is that you can have Pan-Africanism and all the others but that is really balkanising developing countries into different blocks. NAM, if it’s strategically, redefined, to reflect the contemporary world; you have the numbers: I think the point is developing countries coming together to make a decision rather than in small groups.”