Organized Chorus

In the spacious Celebration Hall of Cairo University last week 500 delegates from more than 40 countries rallied under a huge banner showing two hands, one light and one dark, clasped around a torch that lit up the outlines of Asia and Africa. A milling throng of students waved a banner that read DOWN WITH THE EISENHOWER DOCTRINE; from the gallery, schoolgirls shouted: "No bases--no pacts --no H-bomb!"

Opening the proceedings, Brigadier Anwar el Sadat, Deputy Speaker of the Egyptian National Assembly, rejoiced at prolix length in the new freedom of lands "where once Western wild beasts roamed." Getting down to the real business of the meeting, an Indian delegate attacked the NATO summit meeting as "a clear indication of the design of the imperialist powers to interfere in Afro-Asian affairs." Briskly following up that lead, Japan's Professor Kaoru Yasui warned that the aim of Britain and the U.S. was "to explode atom and hydrogen bombs over the heads of the colored race."

The official title of this week-long hymn of hatred for the West was the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Conference. Its delegates, sadly enough, were in many cases people of substance and standing in their native lands. The Indian delegation was led by bulky, 71-year-old Mrs. Rameshwari Nehru, a respected social worker and cousin-in-law to India's Prime Minister. The 45-man Japanese contingent was headed by Tokutaro Kitamura, a prominent banker and Liberal-Democratic member of Japan's Diet. Among the delegates from the Sudan was Foreign Minister Mohammed Ahmed Mahgoub.

No Time for Turkomans. The conference's origins lay not in Cairo but in India, where 2 1/2 years ago a pro-Communist Ihdian M.P. named Anup Singh organized the "Asian Solidarity Committee" to influence the first Afro-Asian conference at Bandung (TIME, May 2, 1955). Last year Singh approached Nasser, suggested a conference in Cairo as a suitable sequel to Bandung. It was a play on words. The delegates to the Bandung conference had been official representatives of their nations, many of them heads of their governments. The delegates to the Cairo conference officially represented nobody but themselves. Unofficially, the moving spirits among them represented world Communism and its sympathizers.

Singh & Co. had succeeded in excluding or scaring off irrepressibly anti-Communist Asians. The Philippines refused to send a delegation, no South Koreans were invited. Two Formosans who asked for admission as observers were turned down, as were two Turkoman refugees from the U.S.S.R. But all the Communist nations of Asia were represented in force. So, too, was the Soviet Union, which had dusted off for the occasion its claim to be as much an Asian as a European power.

Brother to Brother. Predictably, it was the Soviet delegation that stole the show at this "Afro-Asian" meeting. On the second day of the conference, A. A. Arzumanian, director of Moscow's Institute of World Economics and International Relations, announced that the U.S.S.R. was prepared to give economic aid to any and all African and Asian nations. U.S. aid, intoned Arzumanian, "is designed to push the recipients into aggressive pacts and fetter their economies with new military burdens," but "we are ready to help you as brother helps brother." Said Arzumanian: "Our only condition is the extension of aid with no conditions at all. We can build industries for you, hospitals, schools, research institutes. We will send specialists to you or you can send technicians to us. Do what is better for you. Tell us what you want." Despite the unofficial nature of the Cairo conference, the Soviet delegation emphasized that this grandiose offer had the weight of the Russian government behind it.

The Perfect Stage. In New Delhi last week the knowledgeable whispered that Prime Minister Nehru was privately disgusted with the Cairo conference, and embarrassed at his family's involvement in a Communist propaganda show. Egypt's President Nasser, who has no use for his own country's Communists -- on the eve of the conference an Egyptian charged with being a Communist organizer was sent to jail for a year -- appeared to be equally embarrassed, pointedly failed to address the conference in person.

Yet Nehru, because of the self-righteous "anti-imperialism" and one-sided neutralism he has fostered in India, could not criticize the Cairo conference publicly. By offering Egypt as host country for the conference, Anti-Imperialist Nasser had hoped to further his own ambitions for leadership of the Afro-Asian world. Instead, he had given the Communists a well-lighted stage from which to boost the economic penetration of Russia's latter-day imperialism into the whole Afro-Asian world.

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