By George Burchett
[Contribution to the Reimagining Society Project hosted by ZCommunications]
In May this year I visited the Museum Of The Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia.
In April 1955, the heads of state of 29 Asian and African countries1, many of them newly independent, gathered in Bandung to chart a course for peaceful co-existence and mutual respect between all nations. The conference was hosted by Indonesia’s President Soekarno. The museum commemorates this important and mostly forgotten event.
At the end of the Conference, the delegates issued a ten-point declaration known as The Ten Principles of Bandung. They are:
1. Respect for fundamental human rights and for the purpose and principles of the Charter of the United Nations;
2. Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries,
3. Recognise the equality of all races and the equality of all nations,
4. Non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries,
5. Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself singly or collectively, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
6. (a) Abstention from the use of arrangements of collective defence to serve any particular interests of the big powers.
(b) Abstention by any countries from exerting, pressures on other countries.
7. Refraining from acts or threats of aggression or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any countries.
8. Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means, such as negotiation, conciliation, arbitration or judicial settlement as well as other peaceful means of the parties’ own choice, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
9. Promotion for mutual interest and cooperation.
10. Respect for justice and international obligations.
All ten points sound eminently sensible to me.
I was born one month after the Bandung Conference, in Hanoi, Vietnam, one of the participating countries. 1955 was a good year, filled with optimism and promises. The day I was born, the last French colonial troops left Hanoi. Vietnam was finally free and independent, although temporarily divided. In accordance with the Geneva Agreements of 1954, elections were to be held in both North and South, and the country was to be united again. Everyone expected Ho Chi Minh to win the elections in a landslide. One imperial power and its allies wanted to prevent this at all costs. Vietnam was eventually re-united in 1975, not through the ballot box but through armed struggle. We all know at what cost. Millions of people died, millions of bombs were dropped, millions of tonnes of toxic chemicals released and countless atrocities committed because neither the 1954 Geneva accords nor the 1955 Ten Principles of Bandung were respected by the world champions of “freedom and democracy”.
My father, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett – an incurable optimist despite witnessing the horrors of the Great Depression, Nazi Germany, World War II, Hiroshima and Korea – was in Bandung in April 1955. There is a very nice photo of him in the Museum. There is also a photo of the Kashmir Princess, an airplane chartered by the Chinese government to fly China’s Premier Zhou Enlai to the conference. It was blown up in mid air by an American-made bomb planted by a Taiwanese agent in Hong Kong.2 Luckily, Zhou Enlai had a last minute change of plan and flew on a different plane. My dad was also supposed to be on the Kashmir Princess, but eventually flew direct from Hanoi with the Vietnamese delegation led by Premier Pham Van Dong.
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