CHAPTER II

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De-colonization
and Nation-Building
in Southern Asia

IN 1940 Nazi Germany, convinced that the British Empire was finished, tried unsuccessfully to interest its then Soviet partner in taking over the eastern half of the sick man’s estate while the Germans seized the western half. The analysis was rather too dramatic and certainly premature. But by the end of the war Britain was exhausted and unable to hang on to more than a few of its holdings “east of Suez” in the face of rising Asian nationalism. The Labor government elected in 1945, as well as the public opinion that had brought it into existence, was anticolonial in any case. The United States had been committed since 1933 to independence for the Philippines in 1946. The French and Dutch, on the other hand, were not similarly pledged to free their colonial empires in Southeast Asia.

Partition and Independence in South Asia

Since the 1920s British rule in India had been under active political pressure from the Congress, a nationalist movement that purported to be secular but in fact was dominated by Hindus and above all by the saintly Mohandas K. Gandhi and the brilliant, secular-minded Jawaharlal Nehru. One reason for Hindu dominance of the Congress was the relative backwardness of the important Moslem minority in the subcontinent. Its Establishment, consisting to a large extent of princes and landowners, wanted to prevent the Congress, and especially the socialist Nehru, from organizing the Moslem masses and eliminating the privileges of the Moslem elite. Accordingly, during the late 1930s the latter appealed to the Moslem masses by insisting, more loudly than the facts warranted, that the Congress was threatening Islam in India. The result was the rapid growth of the Moslem League, previously little more than an elitist club, to the level of a mass party representing the Moslem community almost to the extent that the Congress, in fact if not in theory, represented the Hindu community. In 1940 the League went on record as demanding that the British give separate and equal status to the Moslem community under the label of Pakistan, when and if they granted India its independence.

When peacetime political activity resumed in 1945, the League began to press its demand by adopting Gandhi’s technique of “nonviolent noncooperation,” or passive resistance. This approach, which was directed against the Congress as much as against the British, tended to escalate all too readily to violence, and under the circumstances violence carried the seeds of religious warfare. Under this threat the British and the Congress agreed reluctantly by 1947 that India must not only be given its independence but must be partitioned into two separate states in the process. The Congress leadership consoled itself with the hopeful thought that a state founded on religion could not survive and would be reabsorbed sooner or later into India, without war. This scenario appeared all the more plausible because the areas that opted to join Pakistan rather than India were split geographically into two wings separated by nearly a thousand miles of Indian territory.

Whatever its prospects, Pakistan emerged into independence at the same time as the Republic of India, in August 1947, amid an appalling upsurge of Hindu-Moslem violence in the two provinces that had voted to split themselves into Indian and Pakistani portions, Punjab and Bengal. Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic in January 1948, as he tried vainly to calm the violence. His death left Nehru the unchallenged leader of the Congress and of India. The vast majority of the 562 princely states, now deprived of British protection and strongly advised to join either India or Pakistan, did exactly that with a minimum of controversy. The outstanding exception was Kashmir, whose Hindu ruler tried to join India in defiance of the fact that a large majority of his subjects were Moslem but then saw the western and northern parts of his territory invaded by regular and irregular Pakistani forces. The result was a local war between India and Pakistan that was terminated by United Nations intervention and followed by an informal partition of the state into Indian-held and Pakistani-held areas.

Nehru’s India

The most remarkable thing about Nehru’s India was that it did not succumb to its problems: overpopulation, poverty, underdevelopment, and social disunity (linguistic regionalism, caste barriers, etc.). But there were major positive achievements as well; India preserved and adopted the parliamentary system inherited from the British, strengthened its claim to the title of the world’s most populous democracy, and launched a massive and reasonably successful program of economic development.

This impressive record can be credited plausibly to three factors. One was the size and competence of the elite in all major fields of activity (political, business, scientific, etc.) that had emerged within the Hindu community during the period of British rule. Another was the unifying influence of the Congress, which dominated political life—although by a gradually decreasing margin-sufficiently to be effective and yet operated in a reasonably democratic manner as compared with most such “umbrella” parties. The third was the personality and leadership of Nehru, who provided a focus of loyalty for the population and an intelligent and dynamic, although, of course, fallible, source of decision making.

Nehru was very worried over the backward and centrifugal pull of traditional influences in India, which have fairly free play within India’s complex federal constitution. He therefore opposed, unsuccessfully, the creation of “linguistic states” (i. e., states whose boundaries had been redrawn so as to correspond approximately with those of India’s major languages) in the mid-1950’s. He was also worried about a possible growth of Communist influence in some of the non-Hindi-speaking states, Hindi being India’s official language and the one often associated by non-Hindi speakers with the Congress leadership, as a result of local Communists exploiting local issues effectively against the Congress. In this way the Communists did in fact come to power in Kerala, in southwestern India, after the general election of 1957. In 1959, Nehru felt safe in overthrowing the Communist government in Kerala, which had gotten into serious difficulties, under his emergency powers. Moscow, which in effect valued him more highly than it did the Indian Communists, did not protest.

Nehru’s reaction was to improve his already rather close relations with the Soviet Union, to insure against the possibility of Moscow inciting the Communists in Kerala or other Indian states to revolt against him. He had always admired what he thought to be the Soviet Union’s approach to its domestic problems, including the ethnic and cultural minorities, and he appreciated the economic development aid and the diplomatic support on Kashmir that had been forthcoming from Moscow since Khrushchev’s rise to effective leadership in 1954. He also tended to sympathize with the Soviet Union as against the United States in the Cold War, although he kept India formally “nonaligned” (uncommitted, neutral) and deplored the existence of military “blocs” (alliances) anywhere, and although he accepted American economic aid. The rather close relationship with the Soviet Union under Nehru has survived, in spite of some strains, down to the present.

Nehru also had strong, friendly feelings for the People’s Republic of China. He considered that independent India and the “new” (i. e., Communist) China together could lead Asia gently and constructively along the path to national development and freedom from Western influence. The Chinese, who like the Soviets appreciated the value of Nehru’s diplomatic support during the Korean War, seemed to reciprocate his friendship for a time (approximately from 1954 to 1957). Even then, however, there were strains. There were fairly serious disagreements over the location of the Sino-Indian border. Most Indians sympathized with the Tibetans, who were being harshly treated by the Chinese, and Peking resented that sympathy. A little later, as the Sino-Soviet dispute developed after the mid-1950s. Peking resented Nehru’s continuing closeness to Moscow. From these differences arose some clashes on the Sino-Indian border in 1959, Nehru’s rejection in the spring of 1960 of a Chinese compromise offer on the border dispute, an intensive but unsuccessful effort to solve it through further negotiations (1960-61), and an Indian decision to occupy the strategic and disputed Aksai Chin area, adjacent to northeastern Kashmir, across which the Chinese had built an important military road linking western Sinkiang with western Tibet. This decision, which began to be implemented in the spring of 1962, when the Chinese leadership was in a militant mood on account of domestic difficulties and crises elsewhere (in the Taiwan Strait, in Indochina, and along the Sino-Soviet border in Central Asia), produced protests and warnings from Peking as Indian troops moved toward the Chinese road and then, in October-November, 1962, a brief border war, in which the Indian Army was badly defeated in fighting that occurred entirely on disputed territory (so that Peking could claim not to have invaded India). The border dispute remains unsettled, but the Indian Army, although now much stronger, seems to have given up any idea of occupying the whole of Aksai Chin in the near future.

The virtual collapse of his relationship with Peking and the defeat in the border war greatly shocked Nehru and contributed to a rapid decline of his health and vigor. Another disturbing problem was an erosion of the Congress’s effectiveness and popular appeal, as a result of which six cabinet members resigned in 1963 in order to devote themselves to strengthening the Congress. One of them, Lal Bahadur Shastri, was soon brought back as Acting Deputy Prime Minister and therefore presumably as heir apparent to Nehru, who died in May 1964.

The Failure of Parliamentary Government in Pakistan

Apart from poverty and (at least in East Pakistan) overpopulation, the situation in Pakistan after 1947 differed unfavorably from the one in India. Leadership talent was much scarcer and tended to devote itself primarily to maintaining its control over the masses and opposing India on every conceivable issue. The Moslem League lacked the maturity and roots among the people that the Congress had developed under Gandhi and Nehru. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the League’s senior figure, was much more autocratic than Nehru; he insisted on assuming the ceremonial title of Governor General (appointed by the British Crown, as in Canada and other members of the Commonwealth), and yet also on dominating the work of the government in a way incompatible with the parliamentary system. A later Governor General, Ghulam Mohammed, behaved in a similar way, also with serious damage to the parliamentary system in Pakistan. Politics were dominated by an alliance of army officers, bureaucrats, and to a lesser extent landlords, against which party politicians butted their heads without much effect except to bring about the adoption of a constitution in 1956 (India’s was adopted in 1950) followed by two years of unstable party politics. The elite and people of East Pakistan (consisting of East Bengal) felt oppressed by the West, which dominated politics and the army and siphoned off much of the foreign exchange earned by the East’s exports. As a result, the Moslem League lost an election in 1954 in East Bengal to the (local) Awami League and declined rapidly thereafter in the country as a whole.

At first Pakistan was as nonaligned in its foreign policy as India, but it began to incline toward the United States in the early 1950s in the hope of increasing the flow of American aid. Soon afterward the Eisenhower administration decided to seek an alliance with Pakistan as a means of getting bases from which to monitor Soviet missile tests in Central Asia and of helping to block a largely mythical Soviet drive to get control of Middle Eastern oil. Pakistan reciprocated mainly in the hope of getting support against India, which the United States had no real interest in providing; the military aid agreement concluded in 1954 specified that the arms provided by the United States could be used only against possible Communist aggression. Always in the vain hope of support against India, Pakistan joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, of which the United States was the founding member, and the United States-sponsored Central Treaty Organization in 1954. One of the main effects of these actions by Pakistan was to arouse great excitement in its two unfriendly neighbors, India and Afghanistan, drive them closer to the Soviet Union, and worsen their relations with the United States.

By 1958, Pakistan’s domestic problems, including the ineffectiveness of its parliamentary system, the tension between East and West, and the stagnant state of the economy, were reaching the proportions of a crisis. The army, with the support of the bureaucracy, accordingly seized power from the politicians in October 1958 and proclaimed martial law. The senior figure of the military leadership, Mohammed Ayub Khan, emerged as President, and for a time provided reasonably effective leadership. The overall performance of the economy was improved, but at the cost of corruption and inequalities of wealth favoring a few dozen business families that were to cause trouble later. Ayub inaugurated a substitute for the parliamentary system, which he regarded as too sophisticated for Pakistan, that he called Basic Democracy, under which a system of local indirect elections was balanced by firm presidential rule. Ayub’s popularity declined, and in a presidential election held in 1965 the opposing candidate, Miss Fatima Jinnah, a sister of the late Mohammed Ali Jinnah, made a surprisingly strong showing against him. A sense that he was slipping then began to tempt Ayub into adventurous behavior that was to contribute to his downfall.

De-colonization and Independence in Southeast Asia

De-colonization in Southeast Asia was inevitable, for reasons already suggested, but it was not inevitably peaceful. France and the Netherlands, which had been occupied by the Germans during the Second World War, had a subconscious need to compensate themselves by holding on to as much of their colonial empires as possible. The result was colonial wars in Indochina and Indonesia, the former of which in view of its importance is treated separately in another Chapter (VII). The United States and Britain, on the other hand, felt no similar urge to hold on where it would have been difficult or unpleasant to do so.

The United States had already promised independence to the Philippines for July 4, 1946, and delivered precisely on schedule, partly for genuinely idealistic reasons and partly to begin the process of getting the islands outside the American tariff barrier so that duties could be charged on Philippine exports to the United States. Another indication that the American attitude was far from disinterested was the fact that the United States insisted that, in return for independence and decreasing partial exemption of Philippine goods from American duties, American citizens be allowed equal investment rights in the Philippines with Philippine citizens. Existing American military base rights, as well as an American obligation to defend the islands, were confirmed in a mutual security agreement. The Philippines’ American alignment was rounded out with membership in SEATO. Unfortunately, the islands’ American-style presidential constitution and formally democratic elections masked a political system dominated by powerful families and bossism and riddled with corruption.

The Attlee government toyed briefly with the idea of trying to restore colonialism in Burma but changed its mind in 1947, mainly because the strong unpopularity of prewar British rule persisted. The Burmese nationalist leadership, organized in the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL), opted for independence outside the Commonwealth, which was granted at the beginning of 1948. The AFPFL had been seriously weakened by the assassination of its leader, Aung San, in July 1947. The leadership as a whole was not only nationalist but Marxist in outlook. U Nu, the first prime minister of independent Burma, followed a foreign policy of nonalignment, partly because of Nehru’s influence and partly because of fear of China. Almost from the beginning, independent Burma was plagued by revolts on the part of Communist groups and various ethnic minorities who resented the domination of the state by the Burmans (the majority ethnic group). Another problem was the so-called KMT (Kuomintang) Irregulars, former Chinese Nationalist soldiers who had settled in northern Burma (as well as some other parts of Southeast Asia) and who by their occasional raids into China created a risk of retaliatory Chinese Communist incursions into Burma; in 1953 the Burmese government repudiated American economic aid because it suspected the United States of collusion with the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan to direct and supply the KMT Irregulars.

The British did not grant independence promptly to Malaysia (including Singapore), because there was less active demand for it than in Burma, because it was of great economic importance to the United Kingdom (Malaya was and is a major rubber and tin producer), and because the antagonism between the economically prosperous and numerous Malayan Chinese (about 40 percent of the total population) and the comparatively backward Malay majority complicated the problem of moving toward independence. Nevertheless, Malaya was given internal self-government in 1955 and complete independence, supported by British security guarantees, in 1957. Its politics were overwhelmingly dominated by the Alliance, composed of the leading Malay party (the United Malay National Organization) and the main Chinese party (the Malayan Chinese Association). By Asian standards the Malayan economy, founded on rubber and tin, was extremely prosperous. Singapore, overwhelmingly Chinese in population, was kept separate from Malaya so as not to tip the ethnic balance there against the Malays, but it was granted increasing degrees of self-government. In 1959 a sweeping electoral victory on the part of the leftist People’s Action Party (PAP) alarmed the British and the Malays with the spectre of “another Cuba” in Singapore. But the PAP and its able and energetic leader Lee Kuan Yew soon shed its Communist elements, partly because the island is heavily dependent on foreign trade and investment and could not afford to frighten them away. When the Communist ex-allies of the PAP, organized in the Barisan Sosialis Party, scored some electoral gains in 1961, the PAP, the British, and the Malay government decided to cope with the problem of possible further gains for the Singaporean extreme left by federating the island together with Malaya and the British territories in North Borneo in a new state to be called Malaysia, which was inaugurated in 1963 over strong protests from China and Indonesia.

The Dutch returned to Indonesia in the last months of 1945 to find that a republic under the presidency of the prominent nationalist leader Sukarno had been proclaimed on August 17, with the consent of the Japanese occupation authorities. There ensued four complicated years of fighting (in particular two Dutch “police actions” in 1947 and 1948) alternating with negotiations, the latter sometimes taking place under American auspices. During this period the Republic, based largely on Java, grew stronger, while the ability and will of the Dutch to suppress it weakened. At last, in late 1949, an agreement was reached that created a federal Indonesian state formally under the Dutch Crown, with the Republic as its major component but with the others still under considerable Dutch influence. West Irian (Dutch New Guinea) was retained by the Dutch and became a major issue between Indonesia and the Netherlands. The central internal relationship of the new state was the one between nominally Moslem, but actually more nearly Hindu, Java and the predominantly Moslem but partly Christian Outer Islands (nearly all the others beside Java); the problem is intensified by the fact that Java is densely populated and needs extensive financial support, which it likes to get from the foreign exchange earned by the exports of the Outer Islands (petroleum, rubber, tin, etc.). The relationship was settled predominantly in Java’s favor in 1950, when the Republic established direct control over the other components; the formal union with the Dutch Crown was broken off in 1954. After the inconclusive general election of 1955, Sukarno began to favor the replacement of parliamentary democracy by what he called Guided Democracy, which in effect was a left-wing presidential dictatorship based to some extent on the Chinese and Soviet models, and with a minimal role for the political parties. This move exacerbated the tensions with the Outer Islands, in which revolts led by both military and civilian Moslems erupted in 1958. Their fairly prompt suppression enhanced the power of the largely Java-based central Establishment but also opened the way to increased tensions within it, mainly between the rapidly growing Communist Party (PKI) and the essentially anti-Communist army. The PKI successfully sought the support of Sukarno for the sake of protection, and of Peking in exchange for support in connection with the Sino-Soviet dispute. A clash between this leftist coalition and the army was postponed first by a politico-military conflict with the Dutch over West Irian, which the Dutch agreed to give up in 1962, and a “Confrontation” with the British and Malaysia in Kalimantan (Borneo) after 1963, but it could not be postponed indefinitely.

Communist Risings in Southeast Asia

Armed Communist-led guerrilla movements emerged to one degree or another during the Second World War in the Philippines, Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia, in addition, of course, to Vietnam. They were naturally opposed to a restoration of colonial rule and tended, like their Soviet and Chinese colleagues, to regard the independent governments that emerged from the process of decolonization as not really independent at all and therefore as suitable targets of what Communists called “armed struggle” (i.e., revolutionary warfare).

As the Cold War escalated in 1947 with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Stalin apparently decided that the United States was in effect asserting a claim to hegemony over the western half of the vast British Empire-cum-sphere-of-influence of the south of Europe, and that it would be appropriate for him to do something similar to the eastern half before the United States could establish a presence there as well. This would mean of course working through local Communist Parties. The general rationale for this offensive was proclaimed in more indirect language, by Stalin’s heir apparent Zhdanov, at the time of the founding of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), an organization of nine European Communist Parties including the Soviet, in 1947. It appears that at the Communist-dominated Calcutta Youth Conference (February 1948), and through other channels at the same time, unpublished directives to revolt were passed from Stalin to at least some of the Southeast Asian Communist Parties, and that these were supplemented by more generalized encouragement from the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Yugoslav parties.

The first revolt was that of the Stalinist wing of the Burma Communist Party, often known as the White Flags, under Than Tun. He refused to be appeased by a program of leftist legislation pushed through by U Nu (nationalization of land and of foreign enterprises, etc.) and launched a guerrilla war against the newly independent government simultaneously with the outbreak of other revolts mounted by various left-wing groups and ethnic minorities. These insurgents could perhaps have overthrown the government if they had cooperated effectively with one another and if they had received significant support from the Chinese Communists. Since neither of these things materialized, the Burma Army under General Ne Win was able by about 1950 to reduce the insurgencies to fairly minor proportions, although it was unable to stamp any of them out.

The Malayan Communist Party, which had grown into a formidable guerrilla movement by fighting the Japanese with British support, was composed largely of overseas Chinese and was responsive to guidance from the Chinese Communists as well as from Moscow. After a series of disputes with the British authorities, it went into revolt against them in 1948. Because of the importance of Malayan exports to the economy of the United Kingdom, the British mounted a huge politico-military operation against what they called the Communist terrorists and soon confined them to the jungle. The British used air transport to establish and maintain jungle forts from which combat patrols could find and fight the Communist guerrilla units, and the latter were progressively isolated from their major source of supplies and recruits, the Chinese squatter population settled near the edges of the jungle, by reconcentrating the latter in new communities where their movements could be controlled and they could be protected from Communist pressures. In these ways the Communists were soon reduced to a minor nuisance, and, after unsuccessfully seeking in 1955 to gain a legal role in Malayan political life, they were forced to transfer their base to the remote jungle area astride the Malay-Thai border, where they remain to this day.

Stalin admired Sukarno’s Republic of Indonesia for fighting the Dutch, and it is not clear what attitude he wanted the PKI to adopt toward it. A prominent PKI leader who returned from the Soviet Union in 1948, Musso, apparently thought that Stalin wanted him to take over the Republic by largely political action, as the Communists in Czechoslovakia had recently done. Some of his colleagues, on the other hand, precipitated an armed revolt against the Republic at Madiun, in eastern Java, which was promptly suppressed by the Republic. It took about five years for the PKI, now under the leadership of the young and able D. N. Aidit, to begin to recover from this disaster by repudiating violence, expanding its membership through various forms of political action, and seeking Sukarno’s favor. Partly because of the refreshing contrast it appeared to present with most of the other parties, which were tarnished by corruption and office holding, the PKI grew so rapidly that by the early 1960s it was the largest nonruling Communist Party in the world.

The Communist-led Hukbalahap (Huks) in the Philippines capitalized effectively on the corruption and ineffectiveness of the newly independent government. By 1948 they were in revolt, although not necessarily on account of a directive received from Moscow, China, or any other external source. The revolt grew rapidly until the direction of the counterinsurgency operations was assumed in 1949 by a new Secretary of Defense, the honest and energetic Ramon Magsaysay, who leaned heavily on the advice of his chief of staff, General Jesus Vargas, and his American adviser, Colonel Edward Lansdale. They intensified the efforts of the Philippine Army against the Huks, as well as improving its behavior toward the civilian population, and offered surrendered Huks not found guilty of individual crimes an amnesty and a homestead in the sparsely populated southern islands. In this way the Huk menace was rapidly reduced, and Magsaysay was elected to the presidency in 1953. He attempted to break the power of the Establishment and institute needed social reforms (notably land reform) but was unable to accomplish much before his death in an airplane crash in 1957.

With the perennial exception of Vietnam, then, Communist “armed struggle” did not prosper in Asia. Just as this fact was beginning to become evident, the Chinese Communists came to power full of the belief that their revolutionary experience, which can be described as highly politicized guerrilla warfare exploiting hatred of real or alleged “imperialist” influence in the country concerned, was uniquely valid in Southern Asia. As part of a complex process of bargaining with Mao, Stalin admitted the relevance of the Chinese revolutionary model. When Mao was in Moscow at the beginning of 1950, Stalin appears to have conceded the Chinese a supervisory role with respect to revolutionary movements in Southern Asia in exchange for Chinese recognition of Soviet preeminence in Northeast Asia (Korea and Japan). Recognizing the poor progress of the insurgencies in Southeast Asia (again except for Vietnam), Peking advised a more political and less military strategy and after 1952 began, as did Moscow, to de-emphasize “armed struggle” altogether in its advice to the Southeast Asian Communist Parties. This shift reflected Chinese and Soviet appreciation not only of the generally unpromising status of “armed struggle” but of the need to conciliate rather than antagonize the newly independent governments of Asia as a source of possible political and diplomatic support against the United States. One of the high points in this process of conciliation, at least where China was concerned, was the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, Java, in April 1955.

The Bandung Conference

Since few African countries had attained independence by 1955, most of the participating countries were Asian. The Soviet Union was not invited, on the ground that it was not truly an Asian country, but China was. The main moving spirit was Nehru, who fancied himself the leading statesman of the Third World. He was correspondingly annoyed when the star of the conference turned out to be the Chinese Premier and Foreign Minister, Chou En-lai.

Chou realized as soon as he reached Bandung that Peking was widely disliked, especially by the Western-aligned governments of Asia but also to a considerable extent by the neutrals, for its recent incitement of “armed struggle,” its pressures on Buddhism and Islam within its borders, and its boundary disputes with its neighbors. Above all, Chou was concerned to combat the effort of the United States to forge an anti-Chinese alliance in the form of SEATO; he was particularly conciliatory to the delegates from Thailand and the Philippines, the two Southeast Asian members of SEATO. At the end of the conference, Chou impressed the delegates favorably by offering to negotiate the issue of Taiwan, which had been under American protection since 1950, with the United States.

While at the conference, Chou negotiated a treaty with the Indonesian government, dealing with the status of persons of Chinese descent living in Indonesia who were considered to have dual citizenship (Indonesian and Chinese). As with the Chinese communities in the other Southeast Asia countries, many of them were economically prosperous, and they were disliked for that and other reasons in Indonesia more than in any other country of the region. Peking, having largely given up the idea of manipulating overseas Chinese for its own purposes because of their vulnerability to local retaliation, wanted as many as possible of the dual citizens to become Indonesian citizens exclusively so as to minimize future disputes; Indonesia preferred to deny Indonesian citizenship to most Chinese so as to be better able to discriminate against them as noncitizens. The treaty adopted a compromise formula, but the Indonesian government for various reasons refused to ratify it until 1960, by which time Sukarno had decided to seek a partnership with Peking for the main purpose of expelling Western influence from Southeast Asia.

Although Chou En-lai’s performance was the most interesting, and probably the most important, aspect of the Bandung Conference, it was not the only aspect. The conference enabled the leaders of the countries represented to know each other better and enhanced their sense of solidarity as against the West. The conference adopted a ringing declaration against colonialism.

Another conference of the same kind, but called an Afro-Asian Conference, was scheduled at Algiers for June 1965. It failed to convene, however, nominally on account of a coup in Algeria at that time, but actually because the Chinese and Indonesians intended to use the conference as a major propaganda forum against the United States, the Soviet Union, India, and Malaysia, to the point where some of the other countries preferred not to see the conference held. With the collapse of the Algiers Conference, the Asian-African (or Afro-Asian) movement also collapsed, although a parallel series of conferences of nonaligned nations continued to be held. The lesson in all this seems to be that the Third World countries do indeed have important common interests, notably some genuine and some imaginary grievances against the West, but that common action on the basis of those interests is difficult to achieve.