La Bombe

The setting was exquisite, the guest list impressive, and, as President Sukarno paid tribute to himself on the tenth anniversary of the birth of the Afro-Asian bloc at nearby Bandung, his taste was as impeccable as ever. Screening off unsightly slum areas, Sukarno laced Djakarta's avenues with flags and festive arches, assigned each of the 35 Afro-Asian emissaries--from Chou En-lai to Imperial Princess Ashraf of Iran--his own personal motorcade, complete with screaming sirens. Best of all was the state banquet, held in the candlelit Bali Room of the Hotel Indonesia. There, while Javanese maidens crooned native melodies, Sukarno fed his guests three French wines and six full courses--including sto Bandung (a rice stew) and a flaming ice cream dish titled bombe glacee Afro-Asia.

Truth to tell, the whole show was a bomb. Hoping to promote his new division of the world into "Nefos" (New Emerging Forces) and "Oldefos" (Old Established Forces), Sukarno had invited 60 emerging nations, advertised that 20 heads of state or government would be on hand. But 24 potential Nefos were disturbed enough at his U.N. walkout last January to turn him down flat, and only Peking and its satellites sent their top men. Of the five sponsors of the 1955 Bandung Conference, only Sukarno was on hand as boss of a nation. Nasser dispatched a Vice President, Burma and Ceylon were represented only by their ambassadors, and from India came not Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri but Chidambaram Subramaniam, the Food Minister.

Paraded from ceremony to ceremony, the delegates at hand spent much of their time untangling their motorcades, found themselves protected by such rigorous security measures that it was almost impossible to confer privately even with each other. Although Sukarno got off three rip-roaring attacks on imperialists and their "nonaligned" lackeys, he denied the platform to all but seven of his guests--and then ordered the suppression of an Algerian speech defending the U.N. Thailand's Foreign Minister Thanat Khoman flew home early and a bored Egyptian diplomat shrugged, "This Bandung thing is only to appease Sukarno's immense ego."

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