From the Non-Aligned Movement to Active Non-Alignment
I believe that I am one of the few survivors left from the Bandung Conference (1955) and that communicating my experience of the process of the creation and development of the Third World, its vision and values, may be the most useful thing I can do.
The world that emerged from the Second World War had a large part of the South as colonies. One need only look at the creation of the United Nations which, it should be remembered, is a term coined by President Roosevelt when he convened a conference of 26 nations in January 1942 to reaffirm the commitment to fight the Axis -Germany, Italy, and Japan- to the bitter end.
The Allied countries (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and China) met from August to October 1944 in Dumberton Oaks, USA to prepare the Charter and design of the future United Nations, which was presented at a conference in San Francisco in 1945, with 50 participating countries adopting the United Nations Charter.
The organisation formally came into force on 24 October 1945, after France, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and China ratified the treaty.
It is important to underline that only the victors of the World War were founding members; and the Big Five retained a veto power, as ‘super victors’.
It is also worthy of note that Asia had only two participating countries: China and India (the latter would actually gain its independence on 15 August 1947). Africa, two: South Africa and Ethiopia. Latin America had 19 countries, obviously allied with the United States and therefore considered winners.
Latin America had won its independence at the beginning of the 19th century, but most of Africa and Asia had been left out of the creation of the United Nations.
The colonies had formed military units for the armies of the “mother country”, whose men, once the conflict was over, became second-class citizens again. In the colonies, all positions of power in the economy, education, health and administration were occupied by white men who came from the colonial power.
But something new was developing, especially among the national elites, many of whom had had access to higher education, often in the major universities: a growing sense of dignity, frustration and injustice.
Colonialism had avoided investing in education, especially higher education. It is estimated that when Libya gained its independence from Italy, the total number of university graduates was 28 men and no women.
Studies, moreover, were a repetition of those in use in the metropolis, with no effort to include elements of the colony’s cultural identity, geography or natural environment.
The Senegalese Leopold Senghor, who created the magazine L’Etudiant Noir in 1934 together with the Aimé Cesar (Martinique) and the Léon Cartron Damas, Guyana), scoffed at the fact that French teachers taught children that “our ancestors, the Gauls, had blue eyes and were blond and tall”, contrary to all evidence.
I think that in Latin America the traumatic process of decolonisation has not been understood. If we do not understand the sense of frustration and rebellion of the elites of the colonies, we cannot understand the birth of the non-aligned nations.
Before the dimension of non-alignment, it was the North-South dimension that was fundamental, which created a sense of identity and common destiny among peoples who had had no relationship with each other, from realities as different as Africa and Asia and, it should be stressed, deeply divided on the same continent, according to the colonial system in which they found themselves.
There was no communication between Francophone, Anglophone or Portuguese-speaking Africa. Communications were vertical with the metropolis. Latin America experienced this until the wars of independence, as the various vice-royalties and captaincies could not trade with each other and all trade had to be conducted through Spain.
The first flight between a French-speaking city, Dakar, and an English-speaking city, Nairobi, was by Air France in 1956, i.e. almost in contemporary times. It was in the metropolis that the architects of colonial independence were formed and met.
I remember the emotion with which Lynden Pindling (who won independence for the Bahamas in 1973) recounted his student days at Oxford with many other fathers of independence for the British colonies.
Between them they spoke of their countries as a fantastic world to others who had never left their colony, and they strove, with a great sense of solidarity, to win debates and competitions with the English, who treated them with a great sense of superiority.
“We were few, but we discovered that we were not inferior. And there we all vowed that, on our return, we would bring our villages to the same level of freedom we saw in England.”
But decolonisation was a long, conflictual and often bloody process. Several of its leaders were assassinated. Indeed, the loss of India and its partition with Pakistan in 1947 was the event that made Britain realise that the process was inevitable.
France had very dramatic conflicts, such as those in Indochina (1954) and Algeria (1962). Portugal resisted until the fall of the Oliveira Salazar regime (1974). The decolonisation process in Asia and Africa lasted from 1956 until the 1970s, followed by the Caribbean in the 1980s.
Roberto Savio (born in Rome, Italy, but also holding Argentine nationality) is a journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of global governance. He has spent most of his career with Inter Press Service (IPS), the news agency which he founded in 1964 along with Argentine journalist Pablo Piacentini.
Savio studied Economics at the University of Parma, followed by post-graduate courses in Development Economics under Gunnar Myrdal, History of Art and International Law in Rome. He started his professional career as a research assistant in International Law at the University of Parma.
Author profile *SOURCE: Wall Street International. Go to ORIGINAL.
