DOING BUSINESS AT NON-ALIGNED SUMMIT
Speakers at the opening ceremony of the 14th summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), in the Palace of Conventions in Havana, included Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, and others.
In 2006, attention at the NAM summit in Cuba is inevitably focused on member states who buck the international order – those who choose to challenge what they see as US-imposed conventions of how to behave. The rhetoric falls neatly into line with the outlook of the host nation, Cuba: American hegemony is bad for economic freedom, for sovereignty and equality. But the NAM is now 118 nations – two-thirds of mankind – and sitting listening to all this are US allies like India, South Africa and Saudi Arabia.
The Non-Aligned Movement grew out of a conviction among the leaders of mostly former European colonies in the 1950s and 1960s that they did not want their futures shaped by either Moscow or Washington. They were guided by a set of principles agreed at a conference in Bandung, Indonesia, of mutual respect, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference, equality and peaceful co-existence.
Over the years, those principles have not been universally applied: NAM members Iran and Iraq, and India and Pakistan have fought bitter wars with each other. Nor have they stuck to the idea that members should not be part of any other bloc: Cuba itself was as close to the USSR as can be imagined until the late 1980s. It was then of course that the old order changed with the end of the Cold War, and the bipolar world became a unipolar world.
Yet the NAM goes on, and even grows. Haiti and St Kitts and Nevis have come to the summit for the first time just this week.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/52519114.stm
Which nations attended the NAM summit?
