Iran hosted the 16th summit of the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement in the last week of August. NAM is comprised of 120 member countries, about two-thirds of United Nations member states. Over 100 NAM members sent official representatives to the summit in Tehran, including 30 heads of state.
At the conclusion of the summit, Iran assumed the rotating presidency of NAM. Egypt’s new president, Mohammad Morsi, passed the presidency of NAM to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was the first trip of an Egyptian leader to Iran since the 1979 Iranian revolution.
NAM was established in 1961. Its main founders were leaders of states that had just gained independence from colonialism: India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Indonesia’s Ahmad Sukarno and Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito. In 1979, socialist Cuba’s revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, summarized the goals of NAM: Supporting “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries in their struggle against colonialism, imperialism, racism and all forms of aggression, domination or occupation.”
Hosting the well-attended NAM summit was a major diplomatic victory for Iran. Hosting an international summit of this magnitude has enabled Iran to counter the claims of the United States, its imperialist allies and Israel that Iran is internationally isolated. Iran is under four rounds of sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council and severe U.S. and E.U. sanctions over its nuclear program. The summit’s final communiqué included a unanimously adopted resolution supporting Iran’s right to a nuclear program. Among other things, the summit also called for the creation of a Palestinian state.
Among the attendees of the summit was U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. While Ban resisted U.S. pressure not to attend, he forcefully presented the imperialist perspective in his talks at the summit.
Preaching to Iran about human rights and democracy, referencing the sanctions against Iran, Ban said, “Any country at odds with the international community is one that denies itself much-needed investment and finds itself isolated from the thrust of common progress.”
Ban’s reference to the “international community” was in direct contrast to the whole purpose of NAM, which is a challenge to the undemocratic structure of the United Nations. The NAM summit is far more representative of the international community than the United Nations Security Council, dominated by veto-wielding imperialist powers United States, Britain and France.
Oppressed countries, those suffering from past and present colonial and neocolonial oppression, are not threatened by Iran’s nuclear program, but from constant threat of imperialist intervention. Venezuela’s foreign minister, Nicolás Maduro, expressed this concept well: “The first lesson the imperialists must learn is to stop interfering in other sovereign nations’ affairs. … They should stop wherever they are meddling, especially in Syria and Iran.”
