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A Century of War
During the following August, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, heads of state and senior cabinet officials of 85 nations, members of the so-called Group of Non-Aligned Nations, met under the host government of Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Among the leaders present were India’s Indira Gandhi and numerous heads of state or officials of African, Asian and Latin American governments, including Algeria and Iraq. FROM COLOMBO COMES A POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE The Colombo gathering began with little fanfare. It hardly seemed any different from one of the endless rounds of bickering and rhetoric among the numerous former colonial states. But Prime Minister Bandaranaike, a veteran of earlier struggles against British and American interests, having expropriated British and U.S. oil companies in the early 1960s, had decided to make the August summit an intervention into the deteriorating economic state of the developing countries in the aftermath of Kissinger’s oil crisis.6 The final declaration of the Colombo meeting, dated August 20, 1976, was a document unlike any produced by developing-country heads of state in the postwar period. The central theme of the 85 non-aligned states had been publicly announced as ‘A fair and just economic development.’ The resolution declared that ‘economic problems have become the most difficult aspect of international relations … The developing countries have become the victim of this worldwide crisis,’ a crisis which was preventing the attempts of these countries to eliminate hunger, sickness and illiteracy. In this context, noting the near doubling of the burden of foreign debt since the onset of the 1973 oil shock and the catastrophic worsening of terms of trade for raw materials export, the declaration proposed several concrete steps towards the creation of a new international economic order. The existing order, it noted correctly, had collapsed, and this was leading to restrictive protectionist policies, recession, inflation and unemployment. Therefore the declaration called for a ‘fundamental reorganization of the international trade system in order to improve terms of trade … a worldwide reorganization of industrial production which would incorporate improved access by the developing nations to industrial products and technology transfer.’ Addressing the chaos of the existing Bretton Woods system, with its ‘anarchy of floating
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