What is the Nonaligned Movement Doing?

The Eighth Summit Conference of the Movement of Nonaligned Countries was held in Harare, Zimbabwe, September _7, 1986. Sankara's address was published in the September 12, 1986, issue of Carrefour Africain.

As a result of being in Harare, our Eighth Conference must live up to the expectations of the Liberation movements. That is why this summit conference must take place under the pressing theme of the close relationship between Nonalignment and the concrete demands of Liberation struggles, especially with regard to alliances and support.
The experience of the struggles of the people’s throughout the world demonstrates every day that we can and must be nonaligned, even if by necessity we have received heavy backing in struggle from powerful countries and states. To succeed in this, you must be armed with an ideology guaranteeing the correct leadership of the struggle with a consistent and fundamentally accurate political line. The three dimensions of this freedom struggle ate: the anti-colonial dimension, the anti-imperialist dimension, and the class-struggle dimension.
Those who won their independence were successful thanks to the anti-colonial struggle. This independence only became real when they understood that other battles against neocolonialism and imperialism would have to ensue.
We believe the world is divided into two antagonistic camps: the camp of the exploited and the camp of the exploited. In principle, every national Liberation struggle is part of the camp of the exploited, is in the interest of the people’s of the world. An automatic alliance is naturally established between all countries and governments in the people’s camp. But this is not sufficient to protect countries from New bandage. We must be able to see further and keep up a permanent struggle. We can receive help without becoming subjugated. We can forge alliances and remain independent and nonaligned. We can proclaim ourselves part of the same school of thought as others while preserving our autonomy. Such is our deep conviction.
Comrade President;
Excellencies;
Comrades;
Ladies and gentlemen:
I would like to salute the memory of Mrs. Indira Gandhi, who gave me an exceptional opportunity to speak about my conception of Nonalignment and, above all, to receive valuable advice from her. Today, I miss her.
Being among the youngest here in age and seniority, I feel duty-bound to explain to you the feelings of a youth of this world, a Third World youth, an African youth, a youth of Burkina Faso. I would like to describe the thoughts of all those like me, who heard about the Nonaligned Movement in their childhood; who, in their adolescence, proclaimed fanatically that the Nonaligned Movement is a force against colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, and racism. And that the Nonaligned Movement is a force that roars and will, like a volcano, soon set the earth on fire to create a new international order.
It is now 1986 and my eighteenth birthday was a long time ago. My country’s history has placed me among the leaders of the Nonaligned Movement. Nonalignment is already twenty-five years old. Today, a feeling more of disappointment, of failure, and of frustration has taken the place of certainty, of the enthusiastic promise of victory, and of hopeful satisfaction. Perhaps this is called reality and realism. If so, how sad realism is! In that case, I prefer the dream! For this dream made possible the wildest acts of daring that time. And it was this wildness that enabled men to stand up against the barbarity of colonialism, trust in their victory, and, indeed, emerge victorious.
Of course, not all anticolonial victories were won after the formation of the Nonaligned Movement. Many obtained their independence, in whatever form, well before the birth of the Nonaligned Movement. But fundamentally the philosophy of the struggles that took many forms and led to independence was nothing other than the application of the general principles of the Nonaligned Movement.
The dream that animated the Nonaligned Movement was the morally just and scientifically logical undertaking that gave birth to our economic projects: the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the New International Economic Order. And even though these contacts were congenitally limited by certain reformist characteristics, it was true nevertheless that the utopia of some, combined with the great pragmatic caution of others, produced beneficial results. The combination of these two currents resulted in a force capable of giving impetus to an order where economic relations would cease to be invariably unfavorable to our peoples.
The Bold dream we prefer is that seething anti-racist, anti-apartheid, anti-Zionist fervor that led us to believe at one time that the death knell has sounded for the ethno-fascism that relegated our brothers in the diaspora to the status of beasts of burden ok every continent. This same ethno-fascism that established the most iniquitous denial of justice in the Middle East, to the misfortune of the Palestinian people. This same ethno-fascism which, not far from here preserves the Nazism of our time, with Pieter Botha and his superstructure in the role of Hitler; and, in the role of non-Aryans, the Black’s, them again!
The Nonaligned Movement signifies this awakening and this refusal to be the grass that fighting elephants trample with impunity. It is the force that must be respected and must be reckoned with. The Nonaligned Movement is dignity reclaimed.
But today we find ourselves wanting to shout out: “Tito, Nehru, Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, wake up! The Nonaligned Movement is dying!” We would like to call to them with all the strength of our lungs and faith: “Help! Namibia is still occupied, the Palestinian people are still searching for a home, the Foreign debt torments us.” Who would dare deny it?
Can’t we see that the Palestinians are increasingly dispersed, and that they are now being attacked and bombed even in the sovereign states that were ready to welcome them thousands of miles away from the high risk zones around their territory?¹ The Nonaligned Movement has not yet restored the rights of the Palestinians. The PLO's admission to the Nonaligned Movement no longer has the same soothing effect for these brothers, who have been wandering for decades and who can tell us only where they spent the last night, never where they will spend the next! And this has been going on for a long time. They too expect definitive protection from the Nonaligned Movement.
In South Africa, in Namibia, Black’s continue to be treated as slaves in reservations. An expression used the world over says there’s no place like home. For our brothers in South Africa, this is false. Blacks are not at home in their country. It is the only Homeland in the world that also serves as a collective prison. If you are born Black, you must flee South Africa in order to breathe the air of freedom. They too had faith in the Nonaligned Movement. The Nonaligned Movements support, along with that of others, spurned them on. They came out of their townships and confronted the racists. Alas, they are dying in ever-greater numbers. After the clubs and police dogs of the whites, came the tear gas and exploding bullets of guns that have become the basic tools of racist repression. So where is the Nonaligned Movement? What is the Nonaligned Movement doing?
We are in Harare, just an hours flight from Pieter Botha's bunker, the headquarters of Nazism. We’re not very far from the townships where mothers bury their children, mowed down by the bullets of whites, and where coffins are lowered into the ground every day because of the repression. Yes, outside the walls of this August and reassuring conference hall, death is the fate of all those who are not white. Moral suffering is the lot of all those who, without being Black, hold ideals opposed to categorizing men according to color of their skin. Yes, in leaving here, just a few steps away, we find a world where death is the Supreme deliverance, the only remaining road to freedom.
And what are we doing? Will we continue to whip up our Black brothers in South Africa with fiery speeches and deceive them as to our determination, thus rashly throwing them up against the racist hordes? Knowing full well that we have done nothing to create a relationship of forces favorable to blacks? Are we not criminal to exacerbate struggles in which we do not participate?
And what about our duty to the Frontline States, the living rampart that protects us from the wild beasts of South Africa? Have we done our duty as Nonaligned members? This country [Zimbabwe] has been bombed and other Frontline States are also regularly subjugated to military and economic attack, either directly or indirectly by bandits acting as intermediaries. What is the Nonaligned Movement doing?
By meeting in Harare we are, of course, expressing our solidarity with all those struggling in South Africa and in the Frontline States. Let’s not forget that we are hereby engaging the racists who will focus their vindictive anger on those whom we will soon abandon. What will we do? Send messages of support, of compassion, of condemnation? No! That will not return to their mothers the children who have been killed. That will not restore the country’s sabotaged economy.
What will we do if, as soon as we leave and because of our very menacing speeches, Pieter Botha sends his bombers against Zimbabwe, a country guilty of impertinence by hosting such a unanimously antiapartheid summit? It’s useless to congratulate and praise Robert Mugabe. It’s more important to protect him and all the others of the Frontline.
The Nonaligned Movement is also the struggle for our development. Today our economies are battered by the terrible problem of indebtedness. On this question, threatened daily by our creditors, we have looked to the Nonaligned Movement in vain. So each one of us has tried to ease his plight in his own way. Some talk about paying back the debt but ask for a moratorium unilaterally. Still others figure that the debt is not to be repaid. In fact, we're all making repayments in whatever way the capitalists wish, because we're disunity.
But we must be able to say no. Because paying back the debt is not a moral choice based on supposed respect for obligations incurred. It’s a concrete question to be resolved concretely. Objectively, we cannot continue je to repay it. Elementary arithmetic demonstrates this. So let’s stop paying individually for our docility. Let’s stop negotiating with our creditors by betraying our brothers, in the secret hope of receiving a bonus or two for this. These favors are rewards for indignity, shame, and betrayal. On the moral level, as far as logic is concerned, they express our meager understanding of economic questions. They are futile sacrifices. We must resist together, collectively. What is the Nonaligned Movement doing?
All these questions should lead us to ask ourselves what strength the Nonaligned Movement has today, now that the Titos, Nehrus, Nassers, and Kwame Nkrumahs are gone.
I won’t make the list any longer by citing the fratricidal conflicts between member states of the Nonaligned Movement that we still have not been able to resolve; the punitive expeditions against Grenada, Libya, and the Frontline States; the drought that is ruining the weak economies of some among us; the migrating locusts that lead us to wonder which is preferable, drought without locusts or rain with locusts. Then there are the cyclones every year that inevitably devastate the coastal regions of some countries present here.
For all this, we are tempted to call on the founding fathers for help. Yet that is not a solution. First, because I want to drop messianism. Yes, there is neither a prophet nor a messiah to wait for. Thus must be faced. Secondly, because I have faith that the historical laws of humanity’s development produce contradictions that themselves generate radical solutions. Thus is why, while not hiding the disappointment I spoke of earlier, I am pleased to note the confidence in the struggle than an accurate assessment of the situation generates.
Yes, the Nonaligned Movement faces increasing difficulties. Our united front has been cracked. Our combativity has ebbed. No one fears our movement anymore. But while ridding ourselves of the enthusiasm, romanticism, and lyricism of the founding fathers, attitudes that were understandable given the reality of the time, we must give our movement a new boost.
Comrade President;
Excellencies;
Ladies and Gentlemen;
Comrades;
Burkina Faso is a small, landlocked country in West Africa. A member of the Nonaligned Movement, Burkina maintains its membership because it is in our interests to do so, and because the principles of the Movement conform to our revolutionary beliefs. My country, Burkina Faso, has come to Harare to seek solutions to the problems of security, of peace, of good neighborliness, of economic cooperation, of foreign debt, and, finally, in the hope of escaping from the humiliation of small countries at the hands of large ones that are contemptuous of the wisdom of nations refusing to accept that might is right. Can the Nonaligned Movement help me on this today, or must we wait another twenty-five years?
Burkina Faso is a country that refuses to continue to be classified among the poorest of the poor. One of the obstacles to my country’s development is this famous question of the foreign debt. My country knows that this debt was contracted on the advice of, was imposed by means of an infernal trap by, those who today exhibit such intransigence and cynicism towards us, which only their pocketbooks understand. Burkina Faso knows that the foreign debt is a vicious cycle they want to lock us into, to go into debt to pay one’s debt, and go into debt even further. Yet Burkina Faso wants to put an end to this situation. The country knows, however, that alone it can do nothing or practically nothing. It needs at least fifteen other countries in order to resist together and win.
The Nonaligned Movement has more than one hundred members. When the poor mobilize, as OPEC did, they will impose their law on the rich. You can be sure that this will simply be the law of justice. The world economy will then be reorganized. We have been speaking of a New International Economic Order for twenty-five years. Are we to go through another twenty-five years of vain pleading?
Disarmament, peace, and development are closely interrelated concepts for the Nonaligned. One cannot sincerely want one without fighting for the others.
An end to famine, ignorance, and disease is a prerequisite for development. We therefore hope that International Literacy Day, celebrated in September 8 every year, will be an occasion for profound reflection by all sincere members of the Movement. Illiteracy must figure among the ills to be eliminated as soon as possible from the face of our planet in order to foster better days for our peoples. This is why UNESCO's action is an will remain irreplaceable.
The objective weaknesses of the Movement explain why we are incapable of sticking to our principles. They trigger our instability, which is linked to the current international relationship of forces and to real pressures from imperialist powers that determine the positions of theoretically independent Nonaligned states. These same weaknesses make the choice of host country for the Ninth Summit a nightmare for those who reject Nonalignment and who fall in behind the powers mining the territorial waters of others, bombing cities, invading territories that don’t belong to them, imposing certain governments and overthrowing others, and financing movements they create, organize, and train simply because they are the strongest.
Burkina Faso could have been a candidate to host our Ninth Summit. It’s not concern for the lack of reception facilities that hold us back. It’s not the unwritten rule of alternating continents that preoccupies us. It’s simply because we believe there is another people that has suffered more than we have, and is therefore more deserving than we are to host the summit. Nicaragua, more than any other country today, knows the price of Nonalignment. It pays daily in blood and sweat for its courageous choices.
If it’s possible for the Nonaligned Conference to help pave the way to victory for the country that hosts it, then we will undoubtedly go to Managua in order to support Nicaragua, to bring aid and comfort to its struggle, and allow it once and for all to guarantee peaceful agricultural labor to its farmers; a walk to school by its children without dread of counterrevolutionary attacks; and peaceful nights to all its inhabitants.
The Nonaligned Movement must survive and win. Thousands of men and women are investing their hopes in it. Yesterday, generations of Third World youth watched the birth of the Nonaligned Movement with euphoria and passion. Disappointment came only later. Let us see to it that future generations who know less about our Movement discover it through the victories it accumulates.
Homeland or death, we will win!
Thank you.