DIPLOMACY: Sri Lanka Summit: Noisy Neutrality

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To prepare for the distinguished visitors, the authorities moved all the tattered beggars and cripples of Colombo out to temporary "rehabilitation centers" in the countryside. At a cost of $40 million or so, they decked the streets with the flags of 85 nations, hastily widened roads, improved hotels, organized the tightest security precautions in years and even arranged for a band that could serenade the guests with selections from Oklahoma! And so the government of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) was ready to welcome more than 2,000 elaborately robed and uniformed delegates to the fifth Summit Conference of Nonaligned Countries.

Some notables sent their regrets. Cuba's Fidel Castro said he was busy, and so did North Korea's Kim II Sung and Uganda's Idi Amin ("Big Daddy") Dada. Among those who did gather in Colombo: Viet Nam's ascetic Premier Pham Van Dong, Libya's mercurial Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, India's stately Indira Gandhi, Cyprus' black-bearded Archbishop Makarios.

Yugoslavia's President Josip Broz Tito, 84, the last surviving founder of the nonaligned group, soon began to feel dismay at the course the conference was taking. Could they not, he asked the delegates, avoid ideological rhetoric and argue out bilateral disagreements at "another place and at some other time?" Evidently not. The summit meeting made it abundantly clear that many of the supposedly nonaligned are anything but neutral. Indeed, the conference served as a forum for a wide range of attacks against alleged Western "imperialism."

It also gave countries like Cuba* an opportunity to define neutralism in a distinctly pugnacious way. "Simple noncommitment to military blocs," said Deputy Prime Minister Carlos Rafael Rodriguez of Cuba, should not qualify a country for membership among the nonaligned. Rodriguez pushed instead for the idea of "international solidarity" as "a permanent duty of the peoples committed to revolution." By that he meant such things as Cuban military intervention in Angola, a type of international solidarity that Rodriguez said would "not be interrupted."

That stand drew protests from Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Hussein bin Onn and Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Lee specifically criticized "countries like Laos" for their "urge to proselytize" and added that "we cannot tolerate interference in the internal affairs of any member."