The Seesaw Summit

All week long, an Algerian army band tootled discordantly through some 60 unfamiliar national anthems. Bureaucrats frantically cabled Paris to find out what had happened to 200 new Citroen limousines ordered for the great occasion. And Des Pins, a once tranquil seaside resort where the Algerian government insisted to the bitter end that the second Afro-Asian Conference would take place this week on schedule, looked like a manic blend of Hellzapoppin and The Last Days of Pompeii.

Battalions of workers struggled to plant trees, lay pavement, erect lamp posts. Air-conditioning and simultaneous-translation equipment was installed but not hooked up. Toilets refused to flush. Generators stood uncrated in the sand. At least ten of 65 new villas for visiting chiefs of state had no walls. To add to the confusion at "Shambles-onSea," as newsmen dubbed Des Pins, the multimillion-dollar conference hall at week's end was ripped by a violent explosion--presumably the work of anti-government terrorists.

Khoya Quandary. For all the herculean effort, the Afro-Asian* "summit" was doomed in advance to be a colossal anticlimax. As one Arab diplomat observed: "You can't have a coup and a conference." Yet that was exactly what Colonel Houari Boumedienne hoped to achieve. Since every invitation to the conference had been personally issued by President Ahmed ben Bella, the man whom Boumedienne had deposed a week earlier, many heads of state doubted the propriety of attending it as guests of the new regime; others were frankly worried about their safety. Even before the coup, the nine former French African states had refused to come be cause of their antipathy to Red China and Ghana; after the putsch, nine Commonwealth African nations sent regrets. Several other leaders urged strongly that the conference be postponed.

When a preliminary meeting got under way last week, only 31 of 64 invited countries were present. The dilemma for all the delegates was just what attitude to take toward Boumedienne's regime. Where was it headed? Would it last? It was a particularly ticklish quandary for Arab states that called Ben Bella khoya (brother), as well as for African nations who remember him as a supporter of every liberation movement on the continent.

"Imperial ist Sabotage." Many nations seesawed while Russia and China pondered whether or not to recognize the new regime. Moscow was embarrassed because Ben Bella had been decked out with a Lenin Peace Prize. It hardly seemed decorous to embrace the new man too hastily, so Russia did nothing. China, desperately wanting the conference as a sounding board for anti-U.S. and anti-Russian blasts, ran the risk of alienating Algerian leftists and recognized the new government. Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, while carefully pointing out that recognition was between states, not personalities, still withheld his blessing from the junta that had ousted his close friend and safest ally.

At week's end, after endless disputation and hand wringing, an Afro-Asian committee voted to postpone the conference until Nov. 5. Infuriated, the Peking delegation charged that the summit had been "sabotaged" by "imperialists." The new site? Still Algeria.

* Definition: a state of mind. Cyprus, which professes nonalignment, is called Afro-Asian, while Malta, another former British colony in the Mediterranean, is not. Australia is disqualified because it is loyal to the West; South Africa belongs geographically but not politically. Red China is not nonaligned, but is accepted as "anti-colonialist." In short, any nation can be Afro-Asian if most other Afro-Asian nations want it in the club.

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