South African Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister, Sue van der Merwe, has officially opened the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (Nam) Senior Officials, calling on the movement to work flat out to stem the tide of unilateralism and improve the lives of the poor in the developing countries.

Nam senior officials are meeting in Durban ahead of the 14th Nam Ministerial Meeting which is scheduled to take place in the city tomorrow.

More than 100 foreign ministers from Asia and Africa and key officials of the 115-member Nam have gathered to attend the organisation's 14th ministerial conference, described as a "mid-term review" between the last Heads of State and Government Summit in Malaysia last year, and the next in Cuba in 2006.

The senior officials met in Durban yesterday morning to discuss the conference's draft document ahead of the Ministerial Meeting which will be opened by President Thabo Mbeki.

Addressing the meeting of the senior officials, Van der Merwe said the developing world was facing new and emerging challenges which could not be simply left in the direction of market forces and private financial flows.

She noted that there were new challenges on the international security front brought about by the tragic September 11 attack in the US in 2001.

"Powerful and dangerous forces have been unleashed through the international effects of economic globalisation on one hand and the threat of terrorism on the other.

"The net effect of this is that the marginalised among us thus become even more marginalised when those who have adopted extreme positions take advantage of prevailing international turmoil to vent their own discontentment and xenophobia through acts of terror and intimidation," she said.

She warned that the current configuration of the global system, structures and institutions had provided the developed countries with ways and means to pursue their interests to the detriment of the interests of developing countries.

"Thus it should not have come as a surprise that the development as a priority issue seems to have assumed a less central position on the international agenda. This has translated into growing marginalisation of the interest of developing countries," said Van der Merwe.

She told senior officials that the challenges therefore were for the movement to intensity its work towards the creation of a new people-centred world and an egalitarian world society.

"Now is the time when our movement ought to heighten awareness of the threats to multilateralism through the imposition of unilateralism and it ought to galvanise us into concrete courses of action," she said, adding that the conscience of the developing nations dictated that they should strive for nothing less than self-determination.

"Our consciousness of the need to inculcate a culture of peace and stability in the world and the cultivation of a democratic world culture commands us to support the moral authority of the United Nations General Assembly in world affairs," she said.

After van der Merwe's address, senior officials went into a meeting behind closed doors chaired by Dr Ayanda Ntsaluba, from the Foreign Affairs department. – BuaNews.