The South Gathers in Tehran

By Vijay Prashad
Asia Times
August 2012

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NH23Ak02.html

    Tomorrow, perhaps, the future. - W H Auden

Next week, representatives from 118 of the world's
192 states will gather in Tehran for the 16th Non-
Aligned Movement summit.

Created in 1961, the NAM was a crucial platform for
the Third World Project (whose history I detail in
The Darker Nations). It was formed to purge the
majority of the world from the toxic Cold War and
from the maldevelopment pushed by the World
Bank. After two decades of useful institution-
building, the NAM was suffocated by the enforced
debt crisis of the 1980s. It has since gasped along.

In the corners of the NAM meetings, delegates
mutter about the

arrogance of the North, particularly the US, whose
track record over the past few decades has been
pretty abysmal. Ronald Reagan's dismissal of the
problems of the South at the 1981 Cancun Summit
on the North-South Dialogue still raises eyebrows,
and George W Bush's cowboy sensibility still earns a
few chuckles. But apart from these cheap thrills,
little of value comes out of the NAM. Until the last
decade there have been few attempts to create an
ideological and institutional alternative to
neoliberalism or to unipolar imperialism.

With the arrival of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India,
China and South Africa) in the past few years, the
mood has lifted. The much more assertive presence
of the BRICS inside the NAM and in the United
Nations has raised hopes that US and European
intransigence will no longer determine the destiny of
the world. At the 14th NAM summit in Cuba (2006),
the world seemed lighter. Hugo Chavez' jokes went
down well; Fidel Castro was greeted as a titan. This
seemed like the old days, or at least Delhi in 1983.

NAM summits typically go by without fanfare. The
Atlantic media rarely notice the movement's
presence. But this year, because the summit is to be
held in Tehran, eyebrows have been raised.

The US State Department's Victoria Nuland
hastened to condemn the location as "a strange
place and an inappropriate place for this meeting ...
Our point is simply that Tehran, given its number of
grave violations of international law and UN
obligations, does not seem to be the appropriate
place" for the NAM summit.

The US government is particularly chafed that UN
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is making his
pilgrimage to the NAM (he has attended every NAM
summit since 1961, when Dag Hammarskjold left
Belgrade to his death over African skies). Nuland
notes that the US has expressed its "concern" to
Ban. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
was plainer: "Mr Secretary General, your place is not
in Tehran."

Bombs over Tehran

Israel has been playing a peculiar game these past
few months. Netanyahu and his coterie are the
mirror image of the clownish behavior of Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Both have a
fulsome sense of themselves, preening before
cameras with bluster. Sensational bulletins come
from their mouths.

The fear is that Netanyahu is playing chicken with
the US. He wants either to bait President Barack
Obama to ratchet up the sanctions and fire off one
or two missiles, or else to let loose his own hawks,
flying twice the distance that they flew to Osirak in
1982 to bomb Bushehr now. Netanyahu's pressure
startled his own president, Shimon Peres, who
hastened to note, "It is clear that we cannot do this
single-handedly and that we must coordinate with
America." All this is a game of Chinese whispers,
with so little clarity about what anyone is actually
saying, and a great deal of anxiety about the
exaggerations that have overwhelmed any capacity
for mature discussion.

The US seems to want time for the new sanctions
regime to take effect. In March, Iranian banks were
disconnected from the SWIFT network that enables
electronic financial transactions. Pressure on
countries that import Iranian oil were stepped up,
as the US and the Europeans threatened to take
action against those who did not follow their own
sanctions regime (which are much harsher than the
various UN resolutions that run from 1696, from
2006, to 1929, from 2010).

Iran's central bank has pointed to a deep decline in
the share of Iranian exports - and concomitantly, a
perilous position for its population. What seems not
to be on the radar of those who create these
sanctions regimes is that they rarely turn the
population against its government. In Iran, it might
actually be detrimental to the reform movement.
Washington fulminates about autocracy in Iran and
the bomb, but it does not realize that for most
Iranians (44% of whom live in slums), the core
problem is of livelihood and well-being.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will be in
Tehran. He will meet with Ahmadinejad, and talk to
him about India's attempt to circumvent the
sanctions regime. Between 10% and 12% of India's
oil needs are furnished by Iran. There has been an
attempt to switch to the Saudi supply, but this is
much easier to talk about than to do. The problem
for India and Iran has been over payments, since
India cannot pay Iran for the oil. Iran has therefore
agreed to accept 45% of its oil receipts in rupees,
within India, and to use this money to buy Indian
goods to import into Iran. Delegations from the
business sector have gone back and forth to find
things to sell the Iranians. But problems persist:
The sanctions regime has made it nearly impossible
for Indian tankers to get insurance for their journey
to Iran. Nonetheless, the Indian business lobby
estimates that bilateral trade between the two
countries will rise from US$13.5 billion to $30
billion by 2015.

The tete-a-tete between Manmohan Singh and
Ahmadinejad will also touch on the Indian
investments at the Chabahar port in southeastern
Iran, which has been used to bring Indian goods
into Iran and to bring 100,000 tonnes of wheat to
Afghanistan. India and Iran have invested heavily in
Afghanistan, and both have a common interest in
making sure that the Taliban do not return to power
in Kabul.

Here one would imagine that the US might see eye-
to-eye with these old allies, but Washington's
obsessive blinkers make it impossible for its officials
to be proper diplomats. It has been a long-standing
US aim to break the link between India and Iran,
two stalwarts in the NAM.

Next week, New Delhi and Tehran will reinforce their
fragile ties. Manmohan Singh will not make any
grand gesture. This is not his temperament.
Nonetheless, economic realities and the accidents of
geography make the relationship necessary. This is
unfathomable to Washington.

Blood of Syria

The last time the NAM suffered a major political split
was when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
The bulk of the members wanted to condemn the
invasion, while a few of the more influential (Algeria,
India, Iraq) refused to go along. It damaged the
NAM's credibility. This year, it is Syria that poses the
dilemma.

In May, at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, within sight of
Hosni Mubarak's hospital incarceration, the NAM
coordinating bureau's ministerial meeting tried to
put together a resolution on Syria. The Saudis and
Qataris wanted a strong condemnation of the
regime, but the Syrians, who remain NAM members,
took exception to the draft. The final document was
anodyne, calling for the success of former UN
secretary general Kofi Annan's Six Point Plan.

Annan has quit. In his place has come the seasoned
Algerian diplomat and UN bureaucrat Lakhdar
Brahimi, who is no stranger to the NAM circuit.
Brahimi knows a lot about conflict, having recently
been the UN's man in Afghanistan and Iraq, and
having been the broker to the Taif Agreement (1989)
that suspended the Lebanese Civil War.

Brahimi's role will be difficult. Cynicism tears at
Syria's future. Most discussion on Syria comes at it
from its geopolitics: What will be the impact of the
fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime for US power or Gulf
Arab power in the region? Will this have a
detrimental impact on Hezbollah, on the
Palestinians, on the Iranians? These are valuable
questions, but they obscure the much more basic
class question posed by the uprising in Syria: What
is best for the Syrian people?

There is little argument that Assad's regime governs
with one hand clothed in the military's iron and the
other morphed into a credit card for the kleptocratic
neoliberal elite. There is also little argument that the
Assad regime's brutality toward its population has a
long history, most notably during the first 11
months of the 2011 uprising when the people in
their coordination committees chanted silmiyyeh,
silmiyyeh (peaceful, peaceful) as Assad's tanks
roared into their midst.

The correct handling of the contradictions should
lead one to full support for the freedom of the Syrian
people, which has come to mean two things: the end
of the Assad regime and the retraction of the hand of
the US, the Gulf Arabs and the Russians. But
Brahimi will not be able to move an agenda as long
as the Syrian people's needs are not at the center of
things.

It is also why the NAM will not be able to act
effectively vis-a-vis Syria. One NAM delegation to
Moscow and another to Riyadh-Doha asking for a
suspension of weaponry and a cooling down of the
rhetoric would have a marked impact on Assad and
his beleaguered circle. This is not in the cards.

Leadership has now fallen on Egypt's new president,
Mohamed Morsi. At the Organization of Islamic
Cooperation meeting in Mecca this month, its 57
states expelled Syria. This followed a resolution put
forward by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Only Iranian
Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi cautioned the
group not to act in haste. He tried to take shelter in
Assad's pronouncements about elections and
reforms, none of this meaningful any longer. Salehi
and the Iranians are plainly worried about the
dynamic of history shifting to the advantage of the
Gulf Arabs. This has colored their view of the Syrian
conflict.

Egypt built a small bridge to Tehran at the OIC
meeting. Morsi proposed the creation of a Contact
Group, which would include Egypt, Iran, Saudi
Arabia and Turkey. This was welcomed by all sides.
A few days later at a ministerial meeting in Jeddah,
Salehi met with Egyptian Foreign Minister
Mohammed Amr to draw out the implications of this
Contact Group. Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman
Rahim Mehmanparast said the Contact Group
would be a mechanism to "review and follow up on
[regional] issues so that peace would be established
in the region". Nothing concrete has been achieved
so far, but all indications are that Egypt will use the
NAM process to find a way between the hard lines
on both sides.

Egypt and Iran broke their ties after the 1979
Islamic Republic was formed. But after the ouster of
Mubarak, small gestures brought the countries into
communication. The Egyptians allowed an Iranian
frigate to go through the Suez Canal (the first since
1978). Iran welcomed the Arab Spring in North
Africa as an "Islamic Awakening", and hoped for a
rapprochement with the new Muslim Brotherhood
politicians of the region.

The Qataris and Saudis also had such hopes, and
these are antagonistic to Iran. Emir Hamad bin
Khalifa of Qatar met with Morsi for dinner last week,
where the Qataris pledged $2 billion in assistance to
Egypt (a rumor floated around that the Qataris
wanted to lease the Suez Canal, perhaps to prevent
passage to those Iranian frigates).

Morsi had welcomed Iranian Vice-President Hamed
Baqai a few weeks before the Qatari visit, accepting
the invitation to come to Tehran for the NAM
meeting and hand over the chair from Egypt to Iran
in person. At the OIC meeting, Morsi and
Ahmadinejad were seen to speak for a considerable
period. It is likely that Morsi would like to fashion
himself as the non-aligned voice between Iran and
the Gulf Arabs, and to provide Brahimi with the
kind of policy space he will require.

Morsi has a complex itinerary. He will go to Tehran
via Beijing. Between a conclave with Hu Jintao and
then later with Manmohan Singh, between
discussions with the Gulf Arabs and the Iranians,
Morsi's gestures suggest an affinity with the kind of
multipolar foreign policy developed by the BRICS
countries.

The tea leaves are hard to read. The top issues on
the NAM agenda are Iran and Syria. One is about a
war that Israel itches to start, and the other is about
a war that the Assad regime is conducting against
the Syrian people. The very fact that the NAM
summit is taking place in Tehran shows that there
remains support for Iran against any precipitous
action. If Morsi's Contact Group can be pressured
within the NAM to take a strong class position on
Syria and not hide behind the cynicism of
geopolitics, then this will be seen as a historic
summit.
_____________

Vijay Prashad's new book, Arab Spring, Libyan
Winter, is published by AK Press.

(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd

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