The Faded Dream

It was the costliest wake in history. Through the gilt parlors and echoing halls of Algiers' $30 million Club des Pins sulked 1,800 idle Algerian servants, aided by 30 idle French maitres d'hotel and chefs, who demanded and got a month's salary for what ended up being five days' work. Imported caviar, champagne, whisky and steak poured into the cavernous complex even as delegates and foreign ministers from 45 nations made their reservations to depart. The club's living quarters were not even filled; most diplomats preferred the bustling Aletti Hotel downtown, or the St. George, where the frug and the monkey were nightly attractions. By midweek everyone was gone. With the fading of jet contrails heading toward Bangkok and Baghdad, Accra and Ankara, the spirit of Bandung II passed into history.

Error & Ire. The failure of the long-awaited Afro-Asian Conference in Al giers last week was one more step toward an end to that grandiose dream of the underdeveloped nations: a unified, hard-hitting "third world" of Africans and Asians dedicated to fight "Western imperialism" and further "nonalignment." The meeting failed ostensibly because its membership could not clearly decide on the question of Russian attendance as a fellow "Afro-Asian" nation. Actually, the conference was killed by Red China, whose intransigent leaders could not bear to sit down with the despised "revisionists" of Moscow, and who were equally unsure of winning the condemnation of the U.S. which Peking demands at any good party. But beneath the particulars, Afro-Asian unity had been dying for years.

At the sunny, sybaritic Indonesian resort town of Bandung, some 29 African and Asian nationalists gathered ten years ago to declare their heartfelt disdain of European colonialism and to get to know one another. In the decade since then, the Afro-Asian world has expanded from 29 to 65 nations, each with its own, pressing internal problems. The grand dream of 1955 has fragmented into even more intense subdreams--expressed by smaller groupings such as the Arab League, the Organization of African Unity, the Organisation Commune Africaine et Mal-gache. Even within these groups, glittering chimeras give way to the hard practicality of national interests: Zambia and Malawi, dependent as they are on good relations with neighboring, white-run Rhodesia, refuse to join the African militants who demand the bloody overthrow of Ian Smith.

On Beyond Anti-Colonialism. The erosion of Afro-Asian solidarity is best indicated at the United Nations, where bloc conferences--once the gaudiest of attractions in the General Assembly--are now infrequent. "You can still get what amounts to a bloc vote, on issues like Angola and South Africa," says one

Washington observer. "But outside these it's pretty much every man for himself." Last week the Afro-Asians cemented themselves once more in the Assembly, by a vote of 82-9 urged Harold Wilson to use force to prevent unilateral Rhodesian independence. But for the most part, the old flogging horse of colonialism is no longer all that exciting--if only because colonialism is nearly dead.

Despite growing disunity, the desire of African and Asian leaders to keep talking together on favorite subjects like aid, nonalignment, and the beastliness of the older powers is bound to continue. "We should not jump to the conclusion that they have changed their attitude on world politics," says a Washington official. "They are still fiercely nonaligned. But they have matured." Much of that maturity has come thanks to Red China: by reading Africa as Red rather than black, Peking scared away many leaders, such as Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, who earlier were willing to play ball with China. As one disillusioned Arab leader said last week in the wake of the Algiers collapse: "There is simply no such thing any more as Afro-Asianism. It has been taken over by the big nations like China, who exploit it for their own personal, political ends. I expect there will never be another Afro-Asian conference worthy of the name."

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