Remembering Bandung

Remembering Bandung

Exactly 50 years ago, 29 newly independent Asian and African nations covering half of mankind met in Bandung, Indonesia, to make their way up a global class structure in which they had been no more than flunkeys and coolies.

A few years later, in 1961, the leading countries formed the core of the Non-Aligned Movement to beat a middle path between the contending East and West of the Cold War. To this day, Bandung's spirit of assertive neutrality continues to backbone the external posture of the Third World.

It has remained a standard text in the foreign ministries that now represent three-quarters of the planet's population. That spirit, if less in deed than in word, was celebrated as more than a hundred countries gathered in Jakarta for the Asia-Africa Summit, before going on to West Java to make pilgrimage to Bandung on Sunday.

Yet, apart from the powerful symbolism of the half-centennial, the 1955 conference's ambitions remain woefully unfulfilled. The weight of the world's majority continues to count for little, and nowhere is this more evident than in the UN. Bandung's promise of providing ballast in international affairs has proved elusive.

"The real challenge for Asia and Africa is not about developing the power to confront, but the power to connect," said President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the summit's co-chair. Connecting with the past, and preventing Bandung from relegation to a footnote of history, has just been lavishly accomplished. Its successors must now connect with the future. -- New Straits Times, Kuala Lumpur