ASIA: A Place in the Sun

From sidewalk loudspeakers outside the big Western-style hotels came the scratchy strains of an old Tommy Dorsey recording of Marie. The swarm of delegates arriving in town came in British-and U.S.-made planes, were taken to their hotels in new, pastel-colored Plymouths, escorted by just as new Harley-Davidsons. The Indonesian soldiers who stood on guard at almost every corner, corridor and doorway wore U.S. steel helmets. Only in such trappings, however, was the Western world represented in the great assemblage that gathered this week in the Indonesian resort city of Bandung, where nearly 1,000 leaders of 29 Asian and African countries sat down together in a vague but portentous political communion. There were smiling black men from the Gold Coast and Liberia, keen-eyed Arabs, Ceylonese and Indians speaking in the clipped accents of Cambridge and Oxford, Burmese in silken longyis, a prince from Siam and a self-deposed king from Cambodia, supple Marxist mandarins from Peking and smiling, slightly nervous gentlemen from Japan. In all, they spoke or affected to speak, for more than half of humanity, chiefly the yellow and brown and black half. Loose Bindings. The Bandung Conference nations came together with a loose binding of things in common. Most were newly sovereign countries. All but one or two had been dominated for years by Western colonialism or imperialism. All yearned for a greater place in the sun. They differed in a myriad of ways—religion, ideology, ambitions and inhibitions, animosities, economies, resources and enemies. They could not hope to find much common footing for their mixture of neutralism, Communism, pro-Westernism, antiCommunism, anti-Westernism, and simple, provincial unconcern. Even the conference’s five sponsors—India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon—were not agreed on what the conference should try to achieve. The headliners got together on the way to Bandung. Egypt’s young (37) revolution-maker, Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser, flew to New Delhi to consult in advance with his newfound friend, Jawaharlal Nehru, the dominant man among Bandung’s five sponsors. Before 100,000 Indians who squatted to greet the Egyptian, Nehru got in a plug for the Five Principles of Coexistence he had worked out with Chou Enlai. When a newspaperman asked Nasser, in front of Nehru, whether he subscribed to the Five Principles, Nasser replied: “What are they?” Nehru and Nasser hopped on to Rangoon together for a rendezvous with Burma’s U Nu, the quietly stubborn ascetic who aspires to negotiate a Peking-Washington settlement of the Formosa crisis. With U Nu at the airport, and closely guarded by a small army of armed police, was Bandung’s most powerful and most eagerly awaited guest, Red China’s Premier Chou Enlai. The Premiers and their entourage struggled good-naturedly past thousands of Burmans, happily engaged in dousing each other with water, the traditional way of celebrating Burma’s New Year. “I thought they squirted the water!” said Nehru’s well-dampened daughter. “They just throw the water,” explained Chou En-lai in English. Coconut Milk. Chou turned his charms on Premier Nasser, whose current irritation with the West coincides neatly with Peking’s desire for Egyptian recognition. “The government and people of China have great respect for Egypt,” said Chou. Nasser smiled. Chou asked if this was Nasser’s first trip out of Egypt and, told that it was, added: “You should take advantage of this trip and travel to all the Asian countries.” Nasser smiled again. In Rangoon, the Premiers sipped iced coconut milk and spent hours together conferring on matters coming up at Bandung. Chou En-lai was the first to leave for Bandung, but the last to arrive. Presumably concerned by what happened to a plane carrying an advance delegation from Peking (see below), Chou kept his schedule secret. At its stops his plane was surrounded by troops; it carried ten 45-gallon drums of fuel from home. When required to take on more gas (Standard-Vacuum) at Rangoon, the Communists gave the fuel a litmus-paper test. Although forced down by weather at Singapore, Chou got to Indonesia safely. At the airport, the Indonesians even went so far as to bar some of their own officials. Less melodramatically, Bandung’s other featured performers streamed in. From Manila came ebullient Carlos Romulo, determined to fight off any effort to turn Bandung into an anti-U.S. or anti-Western propaganda barrage. Also lined up on the pro-Western side: Pakistan’s Mohammed Ali, Thailand’s Oxford-educated Prince Wan Waithayakon, Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Fatin Rustu Zorlu (a former NATO delegate), and Lebanon’s stoutly pro-Western Charles Malik. Besides Chou’s, there was only one Communist delegation: North Viet Nam’s, led by Foreign Minister Pham Van Dong. General Principles. For months the host delegation had been trying to put together an agenda (some subjects: atomic energy control, anticolonialism, coexistence, “universal” U.N. membership). Any of these might be exploited and become explosive. But, insisted Nehru: “A controversial issue should hardly be discussed at this conference. The conference should discuss general principles.” They had not gathered, as diplomats often do, to confirm a common purpose, but to find one. What they were really seeking, said Nehru candidly (and for the moment ignoring the stepchildren from Africa) was the “self-justification of Asia.”