Next week,
representatives from 118 of the world's 192 states
will gather in Tehran for the 16th Non-Aligned
Movement summit.
Created in 1961, the NAM
was a crucial platform for the Third World Project
(whose history I detail in The Darker
Nations). It was formed to purge the majority
of the world from the toxic Cold War and from the
maldevelopment pushed by the World Bank. After two
decades of useful institution-building, the NAM
was suffocated by the enforced debt crisis of the
1980s. It has since gasped along.
In the
corners of the NAM meetings, delegates mutter
about the
arrogance of the North,
particularly the US, whose track record over the
past few decades has been pretty abysmal. Ronald
Reagan's dismissal of the problems of the South at
the 1981 Cancun Summit on the North-South Dialogue
still raises eyebrows, and George W Bush's cowboy
sensibility still earns a few chuckles. But apart
from these cheap thrills, little of value comes
out of the NAM. Until the last decade there have
been few attempts to create an ideological and
institutional alternative to neoliberalism or to
unipolar imperialism.
With the arrival of
the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South
Africa) in the past few years, the mood has
lifted. The much more assertive presence of the
BRICS inside the NAM and in the United Nations has
raised hopes that US and European intransigence
will no longer determine the destiny of the world.
At the 14th NAM summit in Cuba (2006), the world
seemed lighter. Hugo Chavez' jokes went down well;
Fidel Castro was greeted as a titan. This seemed
like the old days, or at least Delhi in 1983.
NAM summits typically go by without
fanfare. The Atlantic media rarely notice the
movement's presence. But this year, because the
summit is to be held in Tehran, eyebrows have been
raised.
The US State Department's Victoria
Nuland hastened to condemn the location as "a
strange place and an inappropriate place for this
meeting ... Our point is simply that Tehran, given
its number of grave violations of international
law and UN obligations, does not seem to be the
appropriate place" for the NAM summit.
The
US government is particularly chafed that UN
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is making his
pilgrimage to the NAM (he has attended every NAM
summit since 1961, when Dag Hammarskjold left
Belgrade to his death over African skies). Nuland
notes that the US has expressed its "concern" to
Ban. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was
plainer: "Mr Secretary General, your place is not
in Tehran."
Bombs over
Tehran Israel has been playing a peculiar
game these past few months. Netanyahu and his
coterie are the mirror image of the clownish
behavior of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
Both have a fulsome sense of themselves, preening
before cameras with bluster. Sensational bulletins
come from their mouths.
The fear is that
Netanyahu is playing chicken with the US. He wants
either to bait President Barack Obama to ratchet
up the sanctions and fire off one or two missiles,
or else to let loose his own hawks, flying twice
the distance that they flew to Osirak in 1982 to
bomb Bushehr now. Netanyahu's pressure startled
his own president, Shimon Peres, who hastened to
note, "It is clear that we cannot do this
single-handedly and that we must coordinate with
America." All this is a game of Chinese whispers,
with so little clarity about what anyone is
actually saying, and a great deal of anxiety about
the exaggerations that have overwhelmed any
capacity for mature discussion.
The US
seems to want time for the new sanctions regime to
take effect. In March, Iranian banks were
disconnected from the SWIFT network that enables
electronic financial transactions. Pressure on
countries that import Iranian oil were stepped up,
as the US and the Europeans threatened to take
action against those who did not follow their own
sanctions regime (which are much harsher than the
various UN resolutions that run from 1696, from
2006, to 1929, from 2010).
Iran's central
bank has pointed to a deep decline in the share of
Iranian exports - and concomitantly, a perilous
position for its population. What seems not to be
on the radar of those who create these sanctions
regimes is that they rarely turn the population
against its government. In Iran, it might actually
be detrimental to the reform movement. Washington
fulminates about autocracy in Iran and the bomb,
but it does not realize that for most Iranians
(44% of whom live in slums), the core problem is
of livelihood and well-being.
Indian Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh will be in Tehran. He will
meet with Ahmadinejad, and talk to him about
India's attempt to circumvent the sanctions
regime. Between 10% and 12% of India's oil needs
are furnished by Iran. There has been an attempt
to switch to the Saudi supply, but this is much
easier to talk about than to do. The problem for
India and Iran has been over payments, since India
cannot pay Iran for the oil. Iran has therefore
agreed to accept 45% of its oil receipts in
rupees, within India, and to use this money to buy
Indian goods to import into Iran. Delegations from
the business sector have gone back and forth to
find things to sell the Iranians. But problems
persist: The sanctions regime has made it nearly
impossible for Indian tankers to get insurance for
their journey to Iran. Nonetheless, the Indian
business lobby estimates that bilateral trade
between the two countries will rise from US$13.5
billion to $30 billion by 2015.
The
tete-a-tete between Manmohan Singh and Ahmadinejad
will also touch on the Indian investments at the
Chabahar port in southeastern Iran, which has been
used to bring Indian goods into Iran and to bring
100,000 tonnes of wheat to Afghanistan. India and
Iran have invested heavily in Afghanistan, and
both have a common interest in making sure that
the Taliban do not return to power in Kabul.
Here one would imagine that the US might
see eye-to-eye with these old allies, but
Washington's obsessive blinkers make it impossible
for its officials to be proper diplomats. It has
been a long-standing US aim to break the link
between India and Iran, two stalwarts in the NAM.
Next week, New Delhi and Tehran will
reinforce their fragile ties. Manmohan Singh will
not make any grand gesture. This is not his
temperament. Nonetheless, economic realities and
the accidents of geography make the relationship
necessary. This is unfathomable to Washington.
Blood of Syria The last time the
NAM suffered a major political split was when the
Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The bulk of
the members wanted to condemn the invasion, while
a few of the more influential (Algeria, India,
Iraq) refused to go along. It damaged the NAM's
credibility. This year, it is Syria that poses the
dilemma.
In May, at Sharm el-Sheikh,
Egypt, within sight of Hosni Mubarak's hospital
incarceration, the NAM coordinating bureau's
ministerial meeting tried to put together a
resolution on Syria. The Saudis and Qataris wanted
a strong condemnation of the regime, but the
Syrians, who remain NAM members, took exception to
the draft. The final document was anodyne, calling
for the success of former UN secretary general
Kofi Annan's Six Point Plan.
Annan has
quit. In his place has come the seasoned Algerian
diplomat and UN bureaucrat Lakhdar Brahimi, who is
no stranger to the NAM circuit. Brahimi knows a
lot about conflict, having recently been the UN's
man in Afghanistan and Iraq, and having been the
broker to the Taif Agreement (1989) that suspended
the Lebanese Civil War.
Brahimi's role
will be difficult. Cynicism tears at Syria's
future. Most discussion on Syria comes at it from
its geopolitics: What will be the impact of the
fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime for US power or
Gulf Arab power in the region? Will this have a
detrimental impact on Hezbollah, on the
Palestinians, on the Iranians? These are valuable
questions, but they obscure the much more basic
class question posed by the uprising in Syria:
What is best for the Syrian people?
There
is little argument that Assad's regime governs
with one hand clothed in the military's iron and
the other morphed into a credit card for the
kleptocratic neoliberal elite. There is also
little argument that the Assad regime's brutality
toward its population has a long history, most
notably during the first 11 months of the 2011
uprising when the people in their coordination
committees chanted silmiyyeh, silmiyyeh
(peaceful, peaceful) as Assad's tanks roared into
their midst.
The correct handling of the
contradictions should lead one to full support for
the freedom of the Syrian people, which has come
to mean two things: the end of the Assad regime
and the retraction of the hand of the US, the Gulf
Arabs and the Russians. But Brahimi will not be
able to move an agenda as long as the Syrian
people's needs are not at the center of things.
It is also why the NAM will not be able to
act effectively vis-a-vis Syria. One NAM
delegation to Moscow and another to Riyadh-Doha
asking for a suspension of weaponry and a cooling
down of the rhetoric would have a marked impact on
Assad and his beleaguered circle. This is not in
the cards.
Leadership has now fallen on
Egypt's new president, Mohamed Morsi. At the
Organization of Islamic Cooperation meeting in
Mecca this month, its 57 states expelled Syria.
This followed a resolution put forward by Saudi
Arabia and Qatar. Only Iranian Foreign Minister
Ali Akbar Salehi cautioned the group not to act in
haste. He tried to take shelter in Assad's
pronouncements about elections and reforms, none
of this meaningful any longer. Salehi and the
Iranians are plainly worried about the dynamic of
history shifting to the advantage of the Gulf
Arabs. This has colored their view of the Syrian
conflict.
Egypt built a small bridge to
Tehran at the OIC meeting. Morsi proposed the
creation of a Contact Group, which would include
Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. This was
welcomed by all sides. A few days later at a
ministerial meeting in Jeddah, Salehi met with
Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohammed Amr to draw out
the implications of this Contact Group. Iran's
Foreign Ministry spokesman Rahim Mehmanparast said
the Contact Group would be a mechanism to "review
and follow up on [regional] issues so that peace
would be established in the region". Nothing
concrete has been achieved so far, but all
indications are that Egypt will use the NAM
process to find a way between the hard lines on
both sides.
Egypt and Iran broke their
ties after the 1979 Islamic Republic was formed.
But after the ouster of Mubarak, small gestures
brought the countries into communication. The
Egyptians allowed an Iranian frigate to go through
the Suez Canal (the first since 1978). Iran
welcomed the Arab Spring in North Africa as an
"Islamic Awakening", and hoped for a rapprochement
with the new Muslim Brotherhood politicians of the
region.
The Qataris and Saudis also had
such hopes, and these are antagonistic to Iran.
Emir Hamad bin Khalifa of Qatar met with Morsi for
dinner last week, where the Qataris pledged $2
billion in assistance to Egypt (a rumor floated
around that the Qataris wanted to lease the Suez
Canal, perhaps to prevent passage to those Iranian
frigates).
Morsi had welcomed Iranian
Vice-President Hamed Baqai a few weeks before the
Qatari visit, accepting the invitation to come to
Tehran for the NAM meeting and hand over the chair
from Egypt to Iran in person. At the OIC meeting,
Morsi and Ahmadinejad were seen to speak for a
considerable period. It is likely that Morsi would
like to fashion himself as the non-aligned voice
between Iran and the Gulf Arabs, and to provide
Brahimi with the kind of policy space he will
require.
Morsi has a complex itinerary. He
will go to Tehran via Beijing. Between a conclave
with Hu Jintao and then later with Manmohan Singh,
between discussions with the Gulf Arabs and the
Iranians, Morsi's gestures suggest an affinity
with the kind of multipolar foreign policy
developed by the BRICS countries.
The tea
leaves are hard to read. The top issues on the NAM
agenda are Iran and Syria. One is about a war that
Israel itches to start, and the other is about a
war that the Assad regime is conducting against
the Syrian people. The very fact that the NAM
summit is taking place in Tehran shows that there
remains support for Iran against any precipitous
action. If Morsi's Contact Group can be pressured
within the NAM to take a strong class position on
Syria and not hide behind the cynicism of
geopolitics, then this will be seen as a historic
summit.
Vijay Prashad's new
book, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, is
published by AK Press.
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