The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is not dead. It’s alive. But is it kicking or just tired and on oxygen? After perhaps a long gap, NAM is in the news once again and as the days pass by, the headlines about it will get bigger and bigger.

That’s because yet another summit will be held on Aug. 30 and 31 in Teheran. Once the rhetoric is over and the highfalutin communiqué is released, nothing will be heard about it until the next summit in some impoverished, chaotic Third World city.

There are a lot of questions about NAM, founded by Jawaharlal Nehru, Josef Broz Tito and Gamal Abdul Nasser. Has NAM served any purpose in all these years? Has NAM been able to find any solution to the poverty and hunger among its member states? Have any social problems been resolved? Forget problems between member-states, but has it been able to unite politically? What has it done in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and so many other issues that are of international concern? The answers to all these questions are in the negative.

The fact is that it has not able to achieve anything of any consequence anywhere in the world. In fact, during the Cold War, it even became a forum for shadow boxing between the former Soviet Union and the United States.

Worse is the truth that some members shed their neutrality and acted as proxies for these two big powers. In the bargain, NAM lost all relevance and began to be viewed by the sensible as an anachronism in the fast-moving modern world.

It is time world leaders stopped using the podium at NAM summits to vomit without any restraint high sounding words and ideas that are in reality empty. And it’s time the summits were no longer used as photo-ops. Instead of passing resolutions and issuing communiqués, which are forgotten even before leaders leave the venue of the summit, NAM should venture into concrete action to make itself relevant and meaningful to modern day realities. And it should be non-aligned in the truest sense so that there is trust in it. Only then can it play a concrete role to ensure that at least some of the vexing global problems are resolved. An example is the Palestinian issue.

With neither the United States or the Russians or any other world power not taking an interest in the Palestinian problem, NAM has a chance to play a major role at a time when even the Middle East peace process is dead.

But it seems that this time too, the Palestinians will just get a paragraph in the final communiqué and be forgotten. And if NAM continues on this path, it will soon become the relic and will find just a mention in history books. Or has it already become a relic?