Nonaligned Nations Question New World Order : Summit: Group of mostly poor countries doesn’t want to be left out in the cold in post-Cold War era.

Leaders of the Nonaligned Movement, a group of 108 mostly poor Third World countries known for their lofty rhetoric and bashing of the West during the days of superpower conflict, opened a summit conference here Tuesday in an effort to define a new role for themselves now that the Cold War is over. The West-bashing, however, didn’t entirely stop.

One sign of the difficult challenge facing the movement, which was founded in 1961 to represent the views of countries wishing to remain independent of both the United States and the Soviet Union, was that only 60 of the group’s heads of state, a little more than half, attended the meeting.

Another was the absence of the movement’s firebrands--flamboyant radicals such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Libya’s Moammar Kadafi and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, all of whom face serious problems at home that they may have considered more pressing than setting a new international agenda.

Still, the Indonesian hosts of the six-day conference appeared to breathe a sigh of relief that they would not have to contend with security for Hussein or the Libyan delegation’s request to pitch a Bedouin tent for Kadafi on a tennis court at the Hilton Hotel.

The only 1960s revolutionary figure on hand was the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat, who wore his trademark black-and-white-checked kaffiyeh on his head but who has been unusually subdued since he survived a plane crash in the Libyan desert last April. Also present was Cambodian leader Norodom Sihanouk, the only leader here who also was at the group’s founding meeting in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 31 years ago.

At earlier nonaligned conferences, the discussions were dominated by talk of colonialism and the superpower rivalry but often tilted toward the Soviet Bloc. Now Indonesia and other pro-Western moderates in the organization are talking about redirecting the group to cope with the developing world’s pressing economic questions.

The host of the conference, Indonesia’s President Suharto, told the delegates Tuesday that while superpower rivalry may have ended, the nonaligned nations would still have to struggle against threats to world peace and economic injustice.

“We must also ensure that the ‘new world order’ to which leaders of the industrialized countries often refer does not turn out to be but a new version of the same old patterns of domination of the strong over the weak and the rich over the poor,” Suharto said.

Suharto called on the nonaligned countries to draw up a joint strategy on such pressing economic issues as debt relief, dwindling supplies of capital for investment from the industrialized world and continuing food shortages in places like Africa.

But the movement, which has been hobbled by the lack of unanimity, still faces a split on economic issues, since the members range from hard-line Communists such as Cuba and North Korea to staunch capitalists such as Singapore and Kuwait.

The movement also is threatened by intractable political disputes, as a three-day preliminary wrangle over Yugoslavia illustrated. Islamic countries led by Iran and Egypt wanted to expel Yugoslavia, one of the founders of the movement, because of the Serbian campaign against Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But moderates led by Indonesia prevailed in the end, and the issue was deferred until after the U.N. General Assembly meeting in October.

The nonaligned states are seeking a consensus for the “democratization” of the United Nations, which they believe will be the primary forum for the resolution of conflicts in the years to come. By democratization, they mean an end to the domination of the organization by the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia, permanent members of the Security Council. Proposals call for the expansion of the council and an end to the five countries’ veto power.

Addressing the conference’s opening session, U.N. General Secretary Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a former Egyptian foreign minister, warned the participants that the end of colonialism and power blocs, while welcome, “has not erased the phenomena of power.”

“The temptation to dominate, whether worldwide or regionally, remains,” Boutros-Ghali said. “It threatens the weaker and poorer states, which are still the most numerous in the world. Let us not forget, either, that the Soviet tide, in receding, has left exposed a number of reefs against which many of the fragile hopes placed in new world order have already been dashed.”

The U.N. leader was followed to the podium by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed, who has become an increasingly strident critic of U.S. policy toward the Third World. Mahathir condemned Western nations for not taking stronger action in Yugoslavia to save the Bosnian Muslims, a posture that he said was in sharp contrast to their deployment of ships, planes and money against Hussein’s Iraq.

“Is this the face of the new world order? If it is, it is a frightening face because it is grotesquely distorted. While minor human rights infringements will attract retribution, blatant abuses on a massive scale go unpunished. What kind of new world order is this?” he asked.

The Malaysian leader said that he is convinced by recent history that a “unipolar world is every bit as threatening as a bipolar world” and cited as examples the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama and the kidnaping of a Mexican drug suspect by U.S. authorities.