New Spirit

"It's not tidy, it's an administrative nightmare," said the director. "But it works." The Colombo Plan, with a tiny staff of clerks, is a kind of clearing house for economic relations between 15 "recipient" nations of Southeast Asia and six "donor" nations--the U.S., Britain Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Since the plan was started in Ceylon nine years ago, primarily as a mutual-aid forum of ten British Commonwealth nations, it has become the accepted regional headquarters for development plans affecting a quarter of the world's population. In that time $6 billion in foreign aid has been pledged to its member countries--nearly $5 billion of it from the U.S. About two-thirds of all the aid has gone to India. The original overall goals (17% more irrigated land, 10% more food produced, 67% more electricity generated have long since been attained, yet so vast is the area's increase in population (10 million annually) that living standards have risen only slightly.

Last week the plan's Consultative Committee met in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. That aging nationalist spellbinder, President Sukarno, opened the session with an oration proclaiming that Asians should reject everything from the West except its money. Asian as well as non-Asian delegates found Sukarno's program dated tiresome and useless. "The time has come for us to think less of the colonial past and more of what tasks in fact lie ahead of us," said Ceylon's Finance Minister Stanley de Zoysa, to the biggest applause of the session.

The conference took place just 200 miles from Bandung, where in 1955 newly liberated Afro-Asian nations, full of hostility toward their former rulers, joined in opposition to all colonialism. Red China was there too. Since then Red China has lost friends over Tibet, the older Western nations have won increased understanding of their own motives because they have learned to understand the new nation better, and the new nations themselves have gained in political maturity. The harsh spirit of Bandung was hardly detectable among the delegates who in Jogjakarta last week enthusiastically voted to continue the Colombo Plan until 1966.

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