Not dead yet

WHEN an ageing rock star goes on tour decades after his final hit, people remark cruelly that they thought he died some time ago. The same fate has befallen the Non-Aligned Movement, a 120-member outfit that this week celebrated its 50th anniversary in its birthplace, Belgrade. The city was then the capital of Yugoslavia, a country that epitomised the group's uneasy balance between East and West in the cold war. It is now the capital of Serbia, a country that has not joined the body.

Some 600 delegates, most of them from Africa, Asia and Latin America (the isolated autocracy of Belarus is the only European member), listened to speeches under giant stylised pictures of communist partisans' wartime victories. Equally nostalgically, observers from the ex-Yugoslav countries sat together as a group. Mohamed Kamel Amr, foreign minister of Egypt (which currently holds the presidency) gushed that Belgrade was “a holy place” for him. He called on the participants to emulate their predecessors, who had formed “one of the most powerful movements of the 20th century”.