Drawing the curtain on the Asia-Africa summit in Bandung, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono warned participants that the occasion would be remembered not for what they said in the conference hall but for what they did afterwards. There could have been no more poignant reminder of the need for the leaders of 4.6 billion people, or 73 per cent of the world's population, to move beyond stirring rhetoric to constructive action.
If that hope is realised, the Bandung movement might claim one day to have accomplished the achievements of both Chinese leaders in the slogan: 'Due to Mao Zedong , we could stand up. Thanks to Deng Xiaoping , we are getting rich.'
Fifty years ago, the first Asia-Africa summit affirmed that the cold war was not the most gripping international cause. The basic needs of Asians and Africans mattered more. That conference has been criticised for exalting nationalism and self-sufficiency instead of globalisation and free markets. But in 1955, political self-respect seemed of prime importance when so many Afro-Asian countries were under colonial rule.
Given that limitation, it is no wonder many observers thought that the first summit's most important achievement was that it was held at all. The dramatic outpouring of Richard Wright, a black American writer who attended the conference and wrote a book called The Colour Curtain is worth recalling: 'The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed - in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale. Who had thought of organising such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon the western world!'
History has swept aside all that. With no colonies left, the four-page New Asian African Strategic Partnership could be the road map to prosperity for those countries in the two continents that have not yet made the economic breakthrough (most of them). But however uplifting the idea may be of 'pooling together the vast resources and the tremendous creative energy of Asia and Africa to solve some of the most persistent problems of development', the task demands structures and mechanisms of which there is now little trace.
Three of the partnership's identified aims are to boost trade, step up co-operation in the 'war on terrorism' and curb organised transnational crime. As cross-border objectives, they call for international solutions. That means not only the pooled efforts of participating countries but of the west as well, especially the United States.