Foreign ministers and officials of the 116-member Non-Aligned
Movement (NAM) will discuss the issue of multilateralism and
challenges of development during their meeting in South Africa's
port city of Durban this week.
The NAM originated in a 1955 meeting of 29 Asian and African
countries, at which heads of state discussed common concerns
including colonialism and the influence of the West.
The organization's 14th ministerial conference is a "mid-term
review" between the last heads of state and government summit in
Malaysia last year and the next in Cuba in 2006. Chinese Deputy
Foreign Minister Wang Yi will lead a Chinese delegation to the
meeting. China is one of 29 participants of the 1955 Asia-Africa
Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, which led to the establishment of
NAM in 1961.
Multilateralism, the sidelining of the United Nations, and the
challenges faced by the organization, will be a theme of this
week's three-day meeting, which starts at Durban's International
Convention Center on Aug. 17, according to South Africa's foreign
ministry.
Also under discussion will be the UN's millennium development
goals, which include halving poverty by 2015 and meeting
significant education and health goals by the same date. A meeting
of the NAM Committee on Palestine is scheduled on Wednesday and
will be the first meeting of the committee since the International
Court of Justice finding that Israel's building of a "security"
wall in occupied Palestinian territory was a violation of
international law.
At the 2003 summit, South African President and then NAM
chairman Thabo Mbeki delivered a plea for peace, and for member
countries to do everything possible to "protect and advance the
principle and practice of multilateralism, against the tendency
toward unilateralism," said a report of the South African Press
Association.
The summit was dominated by the issue of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq and the possibility of United States-led
invasion of that country.
Current preoccupations of NAM's members, most of them developing
countries, include globalization, trade and investment, debt and
HIV/AIDS. South Africa chaired NAM from 1998 to 2003, and Malaysia
is the current chair.
The NAM meeting will be followed by a two-day meeting of the
Asian-African Sub-Regional Organizations Conference (AASROC), also
in Durban.
Established to "revive the spirit of cooperation between the two
continents," the AASROC held its first meeting in Indonesia last
year and was attended by delegates from 43 nations.
An AASROC ministerial working group that met in Durban in March
this year decided to create an Asia-Africa Business Forum to focus
on exploring business opportunities and promoting trade and
investment.
The foreign ministry said this week's meeting is expected to
"discuss specific modalities of cooperation between the two regions
aiming to build a durable framework for inter-regional dialogue and
cooperation."
The meeting will also discuss preparation for an AASROC summit
in Bandung, Indonesia, in 2005, which will mark the anniversary of
the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference.
(Xinhua News Agency August 16, 2004)