India happy with draft Havana Declaration

Havana, Sep 16: India is happy with the draft of the Havana Declaration and five other documents that will be adopted at the end of the 14th Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit here today.

Foreign ministers of the 116-member grouping gave the final touches to the documents last night.

Apart from the Havana Declaration or Final Document, the summit will also adopt a Declaration on the Purposes and Principles and the Role of NAM in the Current International Situation.

There will also be a statement on Iran's standoff with the US over its nuclear programme and a declaration on Palestine.

The NAM leaders will also adopt a Document on Methodology and a Plan of Action, Indian officials said.

On Iran, the draft statement calls for an unconditional resumption of dialogue to help resolve the standoff.

In adopting this stand, NAM would seem to be going against the UN resolution calling upon Iran to suspend enrichment and production of uranium by August 31, a deadline that has already passed.

While doing so, NAM seems to have taken the mood of member-countries into account and decided to call for an end to the standoff through dialogue.

''There is a window of opportunity to encourage movement towards dialogue,'' the officials explained.

According to them, the main point of satisfaction for India was that it had been able to tone down much of the rhetoric on a variety of issues.

India was unhappy with the manner in which activism had been sought to be brought into NAM in recent years and the kind of radical agenda that some countries tried to inject into the movement.

Much of the effort by India during the preparatory meetings ahead of the summit was to try and put NAM back on the track of development and make it more relevant in the post-Cold War, post 9/11 world. ''NAM has been variously described as the Parliament of Developing Countries and as the conscience of the developing world.

We wanted NAM to remain on track,'' the officials said.

One of the issues on which India managed to get its way was in the deletion of paragraphs in the final document providing a role for NAM in conflict resolution. India strongly felt NAM had no role to play in such matters and was able to convince others to delete the paragraphs concerned.

In the document on methodology, India was not happy with attempts to formalise the role of the Troika, an informal arrangement set up by the previous Chairman Malaysia. The troika consists of the chairman, immediate past chairman and the next chairman of the movement. The approved draft has removed the attempt to institutionalise this arrangement and talks about strengthening the role of the NAM Coordinating Bureau.

The Bureau, consisting of NAM member-countries' permanent representatives to the UN in New York, is the mechanism through which most of the work relating to the group is handled.

There was also a suggestion that similar coordinating bureaus be set up in Geneva and Vienna, where the UN has offices, but this, too, was dropped.

The document proposes the establishment of a contact group for humanitarian affairs, which can mobilise action and resources in the event of natural disasters or epidemics in member-countries.

The draft declaration on the principles and purposes of NAM reaffirms the role of the movement as a forum of political coordination for the developing countries to promote and defend their common interests.

The document condemns unilateralism and attempts to impose hegemonic domination, the doctrine of preventive attacks against Third World countries and the labelling of countries as good or evil.

The Havana Declaration will, among other things, oppose Israeli attacks against Lebanon and Palestine.

The document will also condemn the continued US blockade of Cuba, the hosts of the summit.

UNI

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