Gedung Merdeka, Bandung · 18–24 April 1955
For one week in April 1955, the governments of twenty-nine Asian and African countries met in Bandung to talk about peace, decolonisation and economic development. The “spirit of Bandung” they left behind was still being claimed ten years later.
Sponsors Participants Bandung
Map data from Natural Earth. Borders might not be historically accurate for 1955.“Yes, we are living in a world of fear. The life of man today is corroded and made bitter by fear. Fear of the future, fear of the hydrogen bomb, fear of ideologies. Perhaps this fear is a greater danger than the danger itself, because it is fear which drives men to act foolishly, to act thoughtlessly, to act dangerously.”
The conference was called by the prime ministers of Burma, Ceylon, India, Indonesia and Pakistan, and met in Bandung from 18 to 24 April 19551. Its agenda was peace and the place of the newly independent countries in the Cold War, economic development, and decolonisation2.
On 6 August 1953, Ali Sastroamidjojo called on President Eisenhower before leaving the United States5. He had spent three and a half years as Indonesia's first ambassador in Washington, and had just been made Prime Minister in a cabinet that took office on 1 August5. After they discussed newspaper reports that the new cabinet was dominated by Communists, Eisenhower voiced the American “strong hope that Indonesia will be able successfully to preserve its independence”6.
A year later, on 28 July 1954, the American ambassador in Djakarta, Hugh Cumming, asked President Sukarno what he thought of the proposed Southeast Asian defence pact, SEATO. Sukarno “thought it best for Indonesia to remain outside”, and after a pause added “certainly at this time”7.
The same year Indonesia and the Soviet Union finally exchanged embassies: Subandrio arrived in Moscow as Indonesia's first ambassador, and D.A. Zhukov opened the Soviet mission in Djakarta8.
In April 1954 the prime ministers of Burma, Ceylon, India, Indonesia and Pakistan met in Colombo, Ceylon. There Indonesia's Ali Sastroamidjojo proposed a larger conference of Asian and African nations, and was given the chance to explore it11. The five met again at Bogor on 28–29 December 1954. Ali reported that the seventeen countries he had sounded out were “most favorable”, and the five agreed to hold the conference in Indonesia in April 1955 under their joint sponsorship11.
Whom to invite was the hard part. According to a Chinese embassy report, whether to invite the People's Republic of China “was actually the main issue” at Bogor: Pakistan opposed it, while India, Burma and Indonesia insisted12. Pakistan gave way when Japan, Turkey and other American allies were invited too12.
Besides the five sponsors, twenty-four countries took part, from Afghanistan to Yemen1. Some were not yet independent: the Gold Coast and Sudan sat beside Japan, the People's Republic of China and both Viet-Nams1.
Not everyone asked came: of the twenty-five countries invited, all attended except the Central African Federation11. Israel was never invited. Homer Jack, an American observer at Bandung, wrote that “except for Arab League hatred, Israel would have been invited to attend the Conference as—geographically—an Asian country”, and that Nehru and U Nu would reportedly have preferred it to be there11.
Not everyone there was uncommitted. Turkey was in NATO, and Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines were in SEATO11. Washington reportedly tried to persuade its allies to decline; when that failed, the SEATO council sent the conference its “cordial greetings”11. At Bandung, the Turkish delegates “coolly told why the threat of communist aggression forced Turkey to join NATO”11.
The official language was English, “a by-product of British colonialism in Asia and Africa”, as Jack put it11. Not every delegation worked in it: the plenary sessions were interpreted into English and French, and any delegation could bring its own interpreter for another language11.
Sponsors in bold
The final communiqué covered economic and cultural co-operation, human rights and self-determination, and the problems of dependent peoples, and closed with a declaration of ten principles for world peace and co-operation1. Among them: “Recognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations large and small”1. The principles built on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence that India and China had worked out in 19542.
On the Middle East, the communiqué “declared its support of the rights of the Arab people of Palestine and called for the implementation of the United Nations Resolutions on Palestine and the achievement of the peaceful settlement of the Palestine question”1. It did not name Israel1.
India was one of the five sponsors. At Bogor, Nehru was among those who insisted that China be invited: the Colombo meeting had already backed China's seat at the United Nations, he argued, so there was “even less reason” to keep it out now12. India and Burma also proposed the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, but agreed to leave them out of the Bogor communiqué until the conference itself12.
At Bandung, Nehru chose not to make an opening address11. He held private talks with Zhou Enlai about Formosa, while India's Krishna Menon met other delegates11. In the closed sessions he argued against military blocs, calling pacts like SEATO “an angry reaction to Geneva”11. It was wrong, he told the delegates, to join pacts with the Western powers, whom he called “protectors of colonialism”, and becoming their camp followers was “degrading”15. Iraq, Lebanon and the Philippines retorted that India was big enough to stand alone and they were not15. India and Burma also softened the most extreme resolutions put forward by the Arab countries11. Jack, a sympathetic observer, concluded: “To Nehru goes the tribute for having kept Asia together under most desperate conditions”11.
The U.S. government at first viewed the conference and the emerging nonaligned movement with caution2. It supported decolonisation but relied on Britain, France and the Netherlands as Cold War allies, and the meeting came as the United States argued over race after Brown v. Board of Education2. In the end Bandung produced no general denunciation of the West2.
China's delegation nearly did not arrive. On 11 April 1955 the Kashmir Princess, an Air India airliner chartered by the People's Republic to fly its delegation from Hong Kong to Djakarta, was sabotaged and crashed into the sea. All eleven passengers were killed and only three of the crew survived; Zhou Enlai was not on board14. China's foreign ministry charged that Nationalist China and the United States had plotted to kill members of the delegation and wreck the conference11.
China's Zhou Enlai took a moderate line in his speeches to the delegates2. In the middle of the first Taiwan Strait crisis, he used the conference to announce that the People's Republic wanted to negotiate with the United States3. The two governments opened talks at Geneva on 1 August 19559. Within six weeks they had agreed how stranded citizens could go home, but on everything else, Taiwan above all, they made little progress until the early 1970s10.
Japan was in the room too, ten years after the war. It had been invited at Bogor as part of the bargain that brought China in12, and it had no diplomatic relations with the People's Republic17. Its delegation was led by Tatsunosuke Takasaki, who hoped to meet Zhou and push for trade between the two countries, although senior Japanese diplomats did not back the plan17. The Chinese delegation's log records Takasaki's side calling on Zhou from 7:40 to 8:30 on the morning of 22 April16.
The conference laid the foundation for the nonaligned movement2. In the words of one left-wing research institute, the spirit “travelled rapidly, touching down in Cairo for the 1957–1958 Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Conference and then in Accra for the 1958 All-African Peoples' Conference before continuing to Tunis for the 1960 All-African Peoples' Conference, Belgrade for the 1961 Summit Conference of Heads of State or Government of the Non-Aligned Movement, and finally to Havana for the 1966 Tricontinental Conference”18.
It was also something governments wanted to claim: in 1963–64 Zhou toured ten African countries to win support for a second Asian–African Conference4. “For the Chinese, such a revival of the Bandung spirit would present the opportunity once again to portray China as the leader of the decolonized countries of Asia and Africa in a forum from which the Soviet Union would be excluded”4. By the end of the 1960s, with most of the original leaders out of power, the spirit had weakened2.