SETTING FOR TALKS “INAUSPICIOUS”

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27637, 19 April 1955, Page 13

SETTING FOR TALKS “INAUSPICIOUS”

(Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.) (Rec. 9 p.m.) LONDON, April 18. The African-Asian conference “promises to prove historic in concept, doubtful in execution and unsatisfactory to almost all the parties in effect,” says the weekly journal the “Economist.”

“While modern science has shrunk distances, mental distances between peoples have not yet been reduced as drastically. And here the doubts about the Bandung conference begin,” the “Economist’’ says. “The South Asian Powers that sponsored the conference called for a political discussion and they are to have one. But they have never seemed either agreed or clear about the aims of this discussion. Never perhaps have representatives of so many governments assembled with so little idea of what they are going to do. “Many Different Harps” “The sad fact is plain that most of the delegations are coming with expectations so different from each other as to be virtually contradictory. So many different harps are being brought to their party that few can expect general applause. “Obviously a conference so lacking in common positive purpose is all too likely to fall back on the negative—to descend to its lowest common den cd inator and stick there. And when Asians are gathered together, the lowest common denominator is antiWesternism. In Asia, anti-Westernism is still usually labelled anti-colonial-ism in defiance of the hard fact of the dramatic withdrawal of colonial power in the last decade.” It may be assumed in advance, the “Economist” says, that the Bandung conference will voice strictures possibly in varying degrees of seventy on the continued presence of the Dutch in New Guinea, the French in North Africa, the Portuguese in Goa and the British in Malaya. “For the Communists, naturally nothing could be more convenient,” it adds. “They, doubtless, show their usual skill in concealing their aims. If they cannot convert, they can at least hope to divide. Cleavage of Sympathies “The obvious difference they will seek to exploit is that between the Asian states that have defensive Jinks with the West and those that insist on non-attachment. This difference cuts right across membership of the Handung conference,, separating Turkey, Iraq. Pakistan, Ceylon, Siam, the Philippines and Japan on the one hand from Egypt, Persia, India, Burma and Indonesia on the other. It makes it possible for the Communists to paint a

picture of ‘pro-Western’ governments confronting the rest and thus to pose as the closest friends and sympathisers of the ‘unattached’ Indians, Burmese, Indonesians and Arabs. The atmosphere of an Asian conference is favourable to such manoeuvres.”

The “Economist” says it is possible that confrontation with the “genial, slick, relentless monster that is Communist diplomacy” may disillusion a number of free Asian statesmen about China’s claims to represent their continent’s wave of the future.

“If the Chinese put on too much pressure at Bandung, they may come away disappointed, as many other delegations will, and some useful lessons in realism will then be taken to heart. But one would be rash to count on any definable gain from the conference that would offset the danger of the welter of inchoate and in part harmful rhetoric.” . It adds: “This first council of Asia has an inauspicious setting.”