Sunday Times 2
Burying Indian Ocean Peace Zone in the high seas
UNITED NATIONS (IPS) — A former Indian ambassador once told an American audience that one of the biggest misconceptions about the Indian Ocean is that it belongs to India. “Not so, but we wish we did”, he said, amidst laughter.
But rising big power politics in the region has virtually doomed a longstanding proposal for a Zone of Peace -– irrespective of whether it is in the Indian Ocean or in India’s Ocean.
The aircraft carrier USS Nimitz leads a formation of ships in the Bay of Bengal as part of joint military exercises with India. 2020 AFP photo
For an unprecedented 58 years, the United Nations has been laboriously struggling to implement a proposal to declare a Zone of Peace in the Indian Ocean (IOPZ), first proposed by Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike before the General Assembly in 1964.
The proposal was also endorsed by the then 113-member Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The main element that formed the basis of a subsequent 1971 UN declaration was the steady escalation of the arms race and the competitive military presence in the region.
At the height of the Cold War, the US, France, Britain and the former Soviet Union had naval bases in the region, including refuelling facilities in Socotra Island in the former South Yemen, Gan air base in the Maldives, Asmara in Ethiopia, Port Victoria in the Seychelles, the UK-owned military bases in the island of Diego Garcia and Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam.
A 1971 UN resolution (2832) did declare the Indian Ocean a zone of peace calling upon the “great powers” to enter into immediate consultations with the littoral States of the Indian Ocean with a view to halting the further escalation and expansion of their military presence in the Indian Ocean.
But it never happened — and the declaration has remained stagnant since then.
And with the growing new geopolitical rivalry between the US and China in the Indo-Pacific region, the IOPZ will likely to be buried in the high seas.
Moreover, the resurrection in 2017 of the informal alliance, originally created in 2007 and called the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (and known as the Quad), comprising the US, Australia, India, and Japan, is now being viewed as a group aligned in their “shared concerns about China’s increasingly assertive behaviour in the Indo-Pacific region”.
Addressing a meeting in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta last December, US Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken said the Indo-Pacific region is the fastest growing region on the planet. “It accounts for 60 percent of the world economy, two-thirds of all economic growth over the last five years. It’s home to more than half the world’s people, seven of the 15 biggest economies”.
And it’s magnificently diverse, said Blinken, with more than 3,000 languages, numerous faiths stretching across two oceans and three continents.
“The United States has long been, is, and always will be an Indo-Pacific nation. This is a geographic fact, from our Pacific coast states to Guam, our territories across the Pacific. And it’s a historical reality, demonstrated by our two centuries of trade and other ties with the region.”
And more members of our military are stationed in the region than anywhere outside the continental U.S., ensuring peace and security that have been vital to prosperity in the region, benefiting us all, he noted.
Ambassador Kshenuka Senewiratne, a former Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the UN, told IPS “as for the Indo-Pacific region, the US seems to be now more proactive due to China’s spread across this region on many aspects through their relationships with respective countries.”
But one cannot run away from the fact that the references to trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) vis- a-vis the US and the region, she pointed out, is due to their domination by China.
“Hence the former’s interest to work with other major economic giants like India, Australia and Japan in the region and its formalisation by creating the Quad. This would be the mechanism that China is watching,” she said.
Blinken’s statement speaks of the spread of the US military in the Indo-Pacific region, which is a misplaced threat, she argued, considering China has used its economic strategy to maintain power in the region and has not wielded its military might. This is so even with regard to the South China issue.
China’s manner of making countries in the region beholden to them is an aspect for the US and other related large economies in the Indo Pacific region to watch and act in a similar manner by seeking to assist in developing those countries’ economies, she declared.
A senior Sri Lankan diplomat who once chaired the 44-member UN Ad-hoc Committee told IPS: “The IOPZ is a dead horse — and beating it furiously is not going to revive it.”
“The key players in New York, and at the UN secretariat, who pay lip service to the idea, keep flogging the dead horse like they do with many such mandates for lack of methodology to bury it permanently,” he declared.
Another former UN ambassador dismissed it with a one liner: “The IOPZ sank many years ago in the wake of the many nuclear powered battle ships”.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior Sri Lankan diplomat told IPS: “Clearly IOPZ was a non-starter given that there are two nuclear powers (India and Pakistan) in the immediate vicinity”.
“Some think it was India that floated it, partly to neutralise Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions but then Sri Lanka took the ball and tried to run with it for prominence in the UN,” she pointed out.
IOPZ drew support from the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) at the UN during the Cold War years and anti- Western imperialism also because of Diego Garcia where the original inhabitants were expelled by the colonial power UK and a military base carved out there by the US.
Subsequently, the rationale for IOPZ dissipated, for example, during Sri Lanka President JR Jayewardene’s tenure when the West was regarded as a protective shield against India which had by then witnessed a rise as the major military power in the region and called for the Indian Ocean to be “India’s Ocean” and Sri Lanka was seen as being within India’s security zone.
With the increasing importance of the Indo-Pacific region for the US, a Peace Zone in the Indian Ocean may not be a political reality, she added.
The Seychelles is a nation made up of some 115 islands in the Indian Ocean. Pic credit: UN News, Manahas Farquhar/ Matthew Morgan