East to West: Non-Alignment is best
As President Rajapaksa made no mention of his Government’s foreign policy in his address to Parliament, we are left with a comment made over the week by Foreign Relations Minister Dinesh Gunawardena that the country will be strictly non-aligned.
That’s what all Governments have said in the past, but the Minister has gone a step further to add that they will revert to Sri Lanka’s role as a frontline member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a role it played in the formative years of the grouping in the late 1950s right unto the 1980s and thereabouts when the Movement began to fade away from the world stage as a third force.
The last NAM summit was in 2019 in Azerbaijan and Sri Lanka didn’t even bother to attend with high-level representation. NAM member states have, over the years, abandoned its original vision and though not irrelevant, the days of the Nehrus, Nkrumahs, Sukarnos, Nassers, Titos and Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike are long over.
Yugoslavia’s Marshal Josip Tito was credited with a comment that non-alignment meant “signalling left and turning right”. That seems what once Communist Russia and China are doing now in an economic sense!
Tito and the others were keen to keep NAM equidistant from the two superpowers of that era, but the Movement tilted towards the Soviet Union which identified more with the aspirations and sentiments of the newly independent countries like Sri Lanka trying to break away from the remaining shackles of colonialism and the growing shadow of neo-colonialism in the post-World War II years.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, NAM members, including Sri Lanka began individually looking for economic support from the West and to hell with unity and solidarity among the group.
A classic example was Sri Lanka voting against a NAM resolution at the UN condemning Britain over the invasion of the disputed Malvinas ( Falkland Islands) because Britain had funded the Victoria dam project. The country paid dearly for this decision when another member state in the neighbourhood got Argentina, as its proxy to sponsor a war crimes resolution against Sri Lanka at the UNHRC in Geneva.
There are new power houses now in the global scene and two of them in this neck of the woods are very sensitive about Sri Lanka’s foreign policy.
Their long range diplomatic binoculars, telescopes, periscopes, sonar sensors and drones are watching every move within this island-nation. They have all tried to take advantage of this country’s weaknesses, with the possible exception of Japan. And when Sri Lanka resists their carrots, they come with the stick.
The Foreign Relations Minister referred to the Buddhist concept of the country adopting a ‘ kalyana mithra’ ( spiritual friendship) approach with all nations -- a friend of all and an enemy of none.
The NAM’s ‘pancha seela’ (five principles of peaceful co-existence) policy is now a thing of the past. Tito’s Yugoslavia itself is no more. Global predators carved up that country into separate states after his passing. Sri Lanka’s Foreign Relations Ministry has shut down its NAM desk and incorporated it into its UN and Multilateral desk.
Resuscitating NAM in the New World Order that has evolved is a tall task for Sri Lanka. And yet, non-alignment is the golden thread that must run through the fabric of its foreign policy. That policy might still be the safest bet for the country to survive in this volatile world.
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