Militarization, development and NAM

As NAM deliberated intensely on nuclear disarmament, unilateral sanctions, the non-politicization of human rights and a host of other issues at its recent 16th Heads of State and Government Summit in Tehran, sections of the international media broke the news that ‘US arms transfers to other countries tripled last year to $ 66.3 billion, giving America a market share of 80 percent.’ US arms sales thus skyrocketed even as its economy and those of the Western world registered distressing recessionary trends.

While NAM did right to focus strongly on nuclear issues, the situation ‘on the ground’ is that the world’s foremost powers are carrying on regardless with their lucrative sales in conventional arms which play a very significant role in keeping the flames of war blazing in hot spots around the world, including Syria and Afghanistan.

In fact, Afghanistan is figuring strongly in the ongoing Presidential election campaign in the US and the Obama camp is at pains to point out to their opponents that while the latter are making heavy weather out of the declining economic fortunes of the US, no mention is being made of the military successes in Afghanistan by the NATO-led Western forces.

Military gamble

Indeed, Afghanistan figured prominently in Barrack Obama’s initial Presidential election campaign four years ago and it was his reasoning then that the ‘terror’ threat purportedly looming over the US would be defused with the hunting down and elimination of Al-qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. This was Obama’s rationale for continuing the US military engagement in Afghanistan.

Obama’s military gamble in South West Asia seemed to have paid off with the elimination of Bin Laden in Pakistan by US commando forces in June 2011, but the military situation in Afghanistan seems to have degenerated into a quagmire currently for the Western military forces.

Even if the Western forces effect a gradual troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and do so on schedule, they would need to arm the Karzai administration to the teeth before doing so and continue with this process in the coming years too. In fact, the US in particular and the West in general would need to keep their allies well armed in the regions they consider strategic and this accounts for the steep rise in arms sales by them to their ‘clients’ worldwide.

But militarization of international relations on such scales would only trigger, sustain and aggravate military conflicts worldwide, besides prompting some regimes to turn their guns on their civilian publics, and this deleterious process should receive the attention of organizations such as NAM, if it has not engaged them already. Accordingly, many of the issues of the early sixties, when NAM was born, are still with us and the time seems appropriate, now that NAM is enjoying a new lease of life, as it were, to address very urgently the question of curbing international conventional arms sales collectively and of doing something tangible in this regard.

The developing world is quite understandably up-beat about its economic prospects in the current international economic environment, with East Asia, in particular, figuring as a region of exceptional dynamism and growth, but the challenge is to ensure that the wealth that is being generated, percolates down to the poorer sections of Third World societies. So, once again, the developing countries and NAM need to take on the question of a New International Economic Order - which is unfinished business from the sixties and seventies, which was allowed to crumble into the Limbo of forgotten things.

One needs hardly underline the link between militarization and underdevelopment. The more governments of developing countries focus on beefing-up their Armed Forces and weaponry, the more deprivations would their publics suffer.

Poverty alleviation

We in South Asia, have two major states which are nuclear-armed but whose masses are wilting amid want and deprivation. India’s number one internal security concern is said to be the ‘Maoist revolt’ which feeds off poverty.

Therefore, it is all too obvious that NAM needs to be proactively involved in raising awareness among its ruling elites on the need to not only alleviate poverty but also ensure that wealth is evenly and equally distributed among their masses. It needs to be a strong moral force against the proliferation of both nuclear and conventional weapons, while doing its utmost to ensure that empowerment of its masses does take place.