SA hosts NAM conference
Chris Khumalo
17 August 2004
The war in Iraq, the Middle East conflict and the Sudanese crisis were set to dominate discussions at the two-day Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) conference that started in Durban on Tuesday.
South Africa hopes to steer the discussions towards achieving "durable" solutions to these problems.
Foreign Affairs director-general Ayanda Ntsabula said on Monday that South Africa had made inputs into draft documents to be discussed at the conference.
He said the conference would review progress made since the previous NAM summit in Malaysia and also discuss preparations for the next summit in Cuba in 2006.
However, like the World Racism Conference, which took place in Durban in 2001, discussions in this conference are set to be dominated by conflicts around the world.
There is a concern within the NAM - following the invasion of Iraq by the US-led coalition forces - that the practice of resolving conflicts through multilateralism is
diminishing.
Developing nations feel this undermines the role of the United Nations and reverses gains made in the past century, where conflicts were increasingly being resolved through negotiations.
"We expect robust discussions on Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict", Ntsaluba said, adding that South Africa did not believe that the "security wall" being built by Israel was "desirable".
"We also do not believe it will contribute to what it desires to do. The challenge now is what can be done to advance the goal of peace in the Middle East. We need to balance between what is possible and what we emotionally want to see.
"We are not looking at short-term solutions in the Middle East but at something more durable", Ntsaluba said.
The NAM has established a 16-nation committee to see how peace can be brought about in the Middle East.
On the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region, Ntsaluba said South Africa was fully behind the African Union's
position, which favoured intervention and dialogue with Khartoum.
Ntsabula said everything was "on track" for the conference, with South Africa and Durban ready to receive the delegates. In total there will be 80 ministers leading delegations to the NAM conference.
President Thabo Mbeki will address the opening ceremony on Thursday.
A two-day meeting of ministers and officials of the Asian-African Sub-Regional Organisations Conference (AASROC) will start immediately after the NAM meeting.
Source: BuaNews
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