Not dead yet

WHEN an ageing rock star goes on tour decades after his final hit, people remark cruelly that they thought he died some time ago. The same fate has befallen the Non-Aligned Movement, a 120-member outfit that this week celebrated its 50th anniversary in its birthplace, Belgrade. The city was then the capital of Yugoslavia, a country that epitomised the group's uneasy balance between East and West in the cold war. It is now the capital of Serbia, a country that has not joined the body.

Some 600 delegates, most of them from Africa, Asia and Latin America (the isolated autocracy of Belarus is the only European member), listened to speeches under giant stylised pictures of communist partisans' wartime victories. Equally nostalgically, observers from the ex-Yugoslav countries sat together as a group. Mohamed Kamel Amr, foreign minister of Egypt (which currently holds the presidency) gushed that Belgrade was “a holy place” for him. He called on the participants to emulate their predecessors, who had formed “one of the most powerful movements of the 20th century”.

The Non-Aligned Movement was in its heyday a talking shop for countries not wanting to display overt allegiance to any superpower—although some, such as Cuba, were firmly in the Soviet camp. It produced much verbiage about colonialism and neocolonialism, with a heavy emphasis on the Western version. It was riven with disagreement over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and had nothing to say about the captive nations of the Kremlin's empire. Yet few would dispute the stature of its founders: Tito (Yugoslavia), Nkrumah (Ghana), Nasser (Egypt), Sukarno (Indonesia) and Nehru (India).

Amid the backslapping, delegates had plenty of time for networking and arm-twisting. Even non-members, such as Serbia, found the shindig useful. Vuk Jeremic, its foreign minister, was only four years old when Tito died in 1980. But he has rediscovered the Non-Aligned Movement as a locus for his campaign against international recognition of Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008. Fond memories of the Tito years are still a useful diplomatic asset in countries such as Cuba and Egypt. He also found that at its gatherings he could lobby scores of foreign ministers in one place. Whether for that or other reasons, just 33 (barely a quarter) of the movement's members have so far recognised Kosovo (for comparison 81 of the 193 members of the United Nations have done so).

Slovenia, now a loyally aligned member of both NATO and the European Union, used the Belgrade gathering to canvass support for its candidacy for a rotating seat on the UN Security Council. Arab diplomats were cajoling delegates to make sure that they would support a forthcoming vote for Palestinian statehood. Fiji wanted to talk about French Polynesia. Business plays an increasing role too: the Serbs and other former Yugoslavs used the anniversary to look for deals, especially in arms and construction. Perhaps this spectral body's next gathering should take place in Davos.