Yudhoyono said both continents should join hands to develop their strategic partnership to stamp out corruption and rampant diseases. (Reuters)

JAKARTA, April 22, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – An Afro-Asian summit opened Friday, April 22, in the Indonesian capital Jakarta with almost 50 heads of state representing two thirds of the world’s population attending to mark the golden jubilee of the first Asian-African conference in the Indonesian city of Bandung in 1955, which gave birth to the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM).

Tackling poverty, graft, underdevelopment and the spread of diseases such as HIV/AIDS alongside plans to forge billion-dollar trade links and close the gap between the Asian and African countries and the developed world are expected to rank high on the agenda of the two-day summit.

Addressing the opening session, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said both the Asian and African countries should join hands to develop their strategic partnership to stamp out corruption and rampant diseases in the two continents, Agence France Presse (AFP) said.

“Corruption retards our national growths,” Yudhoyono said, stressing that the major challenges facing developing countries, Asian and African, center on wars, HIV/AIDS, poverty, and environmental degradation.

The Indonesian head of state further underlined the need to cement Afro-Asian unity, evoking the message of their first summit 50 years ago in Bandung, where leaders sought to challenge the bipolar world of the Cold War era.

“In 2005, we have to sound a new battle cry... now that Asia and Africa are free, we now must take on the next phase of the battle for human dignity,” he said.

The two-day conference is attended by almost 50 African and Asian leaders, including Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, China’s President Hu Jintao, Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa, and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Representatives of 10 regional organizations, and 11 international organizations as well as 1,978 delegates and 1,426 representatives of domestic and foreign media also attend the event.

Encompassing an area that is almost half of the world, Asia and Africa are home to 4.6 billion people, or 73 percent of the world’s population. The combined Gross Domestic Product of the two continents amounts to US$9.3 trillion.

Five-area Cooperation

In his address to the summit, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said there is an urgent need to enhance Afro-Asian cooperation in order to live up to their daunting challenges, the Malaysian news agency (Bernama) said.

Proposing five areas of cooperation between the African and Asian countries, Abdullah said the proposal can be useful in rebuilding a progressive, peaceful and prosperous future for both continents.

The five-area cooperation plan, put forward by Malaysia, focuses on the fields of “Reforming the United Nations, especially in strengthening multilateral system, where principles should prevail over power, ensuring access to affordable medicines for HIV/Aids and other communicable diseases, keeping up the pressure on donor countries to fulfill promises for aid flow in poverty-eradication programs, disarming nuclear weapons but maintaining nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, and strengthening ties with civil society, as a force for development, for a just, democratic and progressive world.

Abdullah maintained that Malaysia, which is the incumbent head of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), has been supportive to the New Asian-African Strategic Partnership (NAASP) which would be adopted at the end of the Afro-Asian summit.

“NAASP is complementary to other initiatives, particularly within the context of South-South Co-operation,” Abdullah said.

The Malaysian Prime Minister stressed that his country was also interested in enhancing relations with African countries, where the country’s trade with the continent totaled US$1.353 billion in 2004.

Overshadow

Mbeki (L) said African and Asian countries still continued to face poverty and underdevelopment despite abundant resources. (Reuters)

Mbeki, for his part, pressed for rallying efforts to eradicate poverty and overcome underdevelopment in many African and Asian countries, the Antara news agency reported.

Addressing the summit, Mbeki said both Africa and Asia had made significant strides towards giving real meaning to the objective of South-South Cooperation as visualized by the Bandung conference in 1955.

“We have built some of the institution mechanisms we need to enable us to act together to achieve our common goals. These include the African Union, its development program NEPAD, Asean and others,” he said.

Mbeki further added that despite the progress they had made, African and Asian countries still continued to face poverty and underdevelopment, which afflicted millions of their peoples.

“Ironically, this exists side by side with the availability of sufficient resources in the global economy to make poverty history.”

The Afro-Asian summit is overshadowed by the simmering row between Japan and China, two of the most powerful countries represented in the conference, over Tokyo's approval of a history textbook that glosses over Japan’s World War II atrocities, AFP said.

A meeting between Koizumi and Jintao, among delegates, was slated for Saturday after Koizumi issued an apology for his country’s war time aggression in his summit speech.