The Indian Ocean (62 page)

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Tourism is an obvious part of globalisation, but there are other implications of these increasing connections. We pointed out that Aden was for a time left behind while ports in the Gulf, nearer to oil, flourished. More recently the dominance of Dubai has been challenged by Salalah in Oman, and Aden in Yemen. Maersk and Sea-Land, two big shipping companies, have bought stakes in Salalah, and the Port of Singapore Authority is running Aden. Dubai has an agreement to manage Beirut port.
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The links spread far and wide. So also with people. Thanks to cheap air travel, Nigerians now work in Jiddah and Mecca, and Koreans and Thais in the Gulf. Somalis working in the Arab world are numerous, and in the 1980s the remittances they sent home were thirteen times the Somalia-based wage bill.
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The sea is also now becoming territorialised. We noted earlier that much of the ocean is the commons, open to exploitation by all, and this is still the case overall. Yet littoral states now claim as their actual territory a zone of 12 nautical miles from the shore, and their Exclusive Economic Zones extend to 200 miles from shore. More and more of the ocean is 'owned' by some state or other. This is facilitated by the way modern techniques, using satellite navigation, can draw lines in the ocean to show boundaries, just as has been done on land for centuries.

Another deleterious, albeit controversial, aspect of a more integrated world is that environmental problems are often global in scale. Global warming, mostly a consequence of rich world industry releasing greenhouse gasses, is claimed to be causing a rise in the level of the ocean. Average global temperatures went up about ½° C in the twentieth century, and the sea level rose between 4 and 10 inches over the same period. Records show that 1998 was the warmest year ever since temperatures began to be recorded 150 years ago. As an Indian Ocean consequence, the Maldives, where most of the 1,200 islands are no more than a metre above sea level, are likely to be under water within thirty years.
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Coral reefs are important tourist attractions, and form a fascinating natural underseascape. They have been under threat for at least fifty years. In the late 1960s Jacques Cousteau worried that coral reefs were in danger as the purity of the water declined. Equally threatening, conchs were being taken to sell their shells to tourists, but they are the deadly enemy of a kind of starfish which is very destructive to coral: consequently coral suffers. More recently global warming has had a catastrophic effect on coral reefs all around the Indian Ocean. At least half of the total died in the two years up to 2000. Coral cannot tolerate a rise in sea temperatures of more than 1 or 2°C for more than a few weeks, yet in the Seychelles in 1998 the temperature was 3°C above seasonal norms for several weeks. The results have been far-reaching. It is estimated that in 1998–99 the death of the coral, or its bleaching to an unattractive monochrome, cost the Maldives' economy about $US 36 million in 1998–99, a result of the impact on tourism and on local fishers.
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There is atmospheric pollution also. In 1999 a haze of air pollution covered some 10 million square kilometres of the Indian Ocean. It was caused by burning fossil fuels from India, China and southeast Asia blown over the ocean by the northeast monsoon. The result was acid rain and lower temperatures. In 1997 the warming of the western Indian Ocean is considered to have caused excessive rain
over East Africa, and consequently a rise in the level of Africa's lakes, and severe flooding on the Nile. In many of the littoral countries indiscriminate clearing of forests has had very adverse effects. It is estimated that for ecological stability one-third of any given area needs tree cover, but in India this is down to 10 per cent. This leads to greater flooding, but also the reverse: as the forest cover diminishes, rainfall declines.
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Threats to the environment are not that new. The ecology of St Paul and Amsterdam islands was radically changed around 1800 by imported and then feral pigs, deer and rabbits, so that, as a contemporary mourned, 'Once they were green, now they are brown, desolate and despoiled.'
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The dodo was rendered extinct by European hunting and introduced animals. In the early 1950s Cousteau was at the Aldabra islands, which consist of four small atolls. He found thousands of giant land tortoises, some with shells five feet long. Herbivores, they graze on grass and seem to have no enemies. Then he went on to a neighbouring island and found heaps of tortoise skeletons. All the grass and shrubs had been eaten by feral goats, and the tortoises had starved.
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The dugong, or sea cow, is threatened by poachers with modern nylon nets. They even use dynamite sometimes. In the southern Indian Ocean both the Patagonian toothfish and whales are threatened by illegal fishing boats. One estimate puts the value of this illegal trade in the toothfish alone at about $US150 million.
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Other littoral areas have been detrimentally affected by various governmental policies. We wrote earlier of the Marsh Arabs and their unique culture (see page 42), but their whole way of life is now close to extinction. Over the last 25 years the size of the marshes has dwindled by no less than 90 per cent. This has been caused by drainage to provide irrigation water elsewhere, and by building massive dams up stream, not only in Iraq but also in Turkey, Iran and Syria. Saddam Hussain has favoured the end of the marshes, for they provide a refuge for Shia Muslims often opposed to his dictatorship. Much of the landscape is now salt deserts, the people are in refugee camps. The smooth coated otter, once common, is now extinct, and migrating birds are left with no havens.
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A final ecological problem is the vast traffic in oil from the Gulf to the rest of the world. Years ago Thor Heyerdahl had a bad time in the Straits of Hurmuz:

By midday we found ourselves for the first time in a terribly polluted area. Small clots and large slices of solidified black oil or asphalt floated closely packed everywhere in a manner that clearly testified to recent tanker washings. But the black tar soup was all mixed with bobbing cans, bottles and other refuse, and an incredible quantity of solid, useable wood: logs, planks, boards, cases, grids and large sheets of plywood. One such sheet carried a deadly yellow snake as passenger. All the wood was smeared and clotted with oil from the seas that tossed it about.
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Oman is particularly affected as tankers deballast as they enter the Straits of Hurmuz. After the spilt oil evaporates and is weathered it washes ashore in the form
of disgusting tar balls. One half of all the world's merchant shipping passes through the Straits of Melaka, and here also oil spills are a constant possibility.
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Globalisation also implies social and cultural worldwide integration, but this is not a one-way street, and nor is globalisation exactly the same as westernisation. Here are a few aspects of influences from outside, which show that any attempt to write a history
of
the ocean covering recent years is really invalid, for so important are outside influences that we really, just like Horden and Purcell in the case of the Mediterranean, can usually only write of history
in
the ocean, that is one that necessarily stresses extra-ocean influences. In the Gulf region internet usage is expanding rapidly. A recent survey found that 42 per cent of users had bought books from Amazon.com, while 38 per cent watched CNN news, only 8 per cent the local Gulf News.
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This changed during the second Gulf War. The creation of Israel in 1948 led many young Indian Jews to undertake aliyah. Frater was told that of the very old community in Cochin, there were only five families left, a total of thirty-one people. Of the remaining young men one was about to leave for Israel, and there had been no local weddings for seventeen years.
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Or consider that Reunion, still a French possession where the Catholic church is powerful, has one of the highest birth rates in the world: nearly 3½ per cent a year. The Jesuit network stretches globally. Young Jesuits from India are adopted by western congregations, often in Germany, and they in turn when they go back to India act as mentors for Catholic communities in East Africa.

We have written extensively about Muslim conversion and rectification networks in previous periods. These efforts continue to today, so that Islam is the fastest growing religion in Africa. Here then is another aspect of globalisation, connections which spread around and beyond the ocean. This is hardly westernisation, and nor is the spread of Indian movies. Too often writers bewail the octopus spread of Hollywood and American TV soaps. It is true that for some years the American soap
Baywatch
was the most watched series in the world, but the spread of Hindi movies in all the Indian Ocean and beyond is equally important. These movies are certainly formulaic, but the formula is different from Hollywood. 'Marsala' films are influenced by Indian classical literature, especially the great epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Every film, regardless of subject matter, has dance and music in conjunction with romance, adventure, violence and morality. What is important is that this recipe appeals not only to the Indian diaspora, but to many others in Africa, the Middle East and southeast Asia. This is understandable in arguably Indianised areas like Burma and Indonesia, but they also find a huge market in Kenya, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Singapore, the Gulf states, Thailand and Indonesia.
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Changes in Indian television have also provided a new market for Bollywood, and all the other areas of India which make movies. Up to the early 1990s the government-controlled Doordarshan mostly, as a matter of policy, promoted the Hindi language. Now that private players have been allowed in, there is much more content in other Indian languages, and also more foreign content. More channels need more product from the local film industry. Here also however westernisation has not been totally triumphant. Rupert Murdoch found that he had to indigenise his offerings via satellite in India much more than he had expected to.
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So far we can write about the distribution of these movies, or for that matter of Islam or Christianity, but we know little about something even more important, that is their consumption. Certainly Hindi and other Indian movies mean different things to different audiences, in other words are consumed in different ways by different receptors, but this difficult matter has been little studied so far.

In some aspects globalisation has acted to increase worldwide communications at the expense of more local circuits. As examples, it is now quicker to get to Paris from Mayotte than it is to get to Zanzibar, despite age-old connections between these two East African islands. Similarly, it is quicker to get goods from a French mail order firm than it is to get something from Mombasa, again undermining very ancient local connections. International connections via satellite, for those who can afford them, are often quicker and more reliable than internal telephone connections in many littoral countries around the Indian Ocean.
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A further aspect of history
in
the Indian Ocean is to look at strategic matters, and the place of the ocean during the Cold War and later. We need also to consider the local reaction to this, which is halting moves towards greater integration within the region, that is then an attempt to respond by a focus
of
or within the ocean.

The context is the end of the British lake period. British naval dominance was plain to see after 1815, and indeed could be dated from the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. This lake took very little effort to remain exclusive, as no other power challenged British dominance, except for a land-based threat from Russia. Britain concentrated her navy in the Atlantic and the Pacific, not the Indian Ocean, and within the ocean spent most money on the Indian Army. The Royal Navy's job was to combat piracy, as defined by the British, and to suppress the slave trade. It was only in the 1920s that British naval dominance worldwide began to be eroded.

As independence got closer the influential author and diplomat K.M. Panikkar wrote a short book about India and the Indian Ocean. He complained bitterly that his fellow countrymen were landlubbers, yet 'In fact it may truly be said that India never lost her independence till she lost the command of the sea in the first decade of the sixteenth century.' From this time 'the future of India has been determined not on the land frontiers, but on the oceanic expanse which washes the three sides of India.' It was crucial that newly independent India have a strong navy, in alliance with a continuing British presence, for British 'interests in the Ocean are such that it will be nothing short of national suicide for her to withdraw from that area.'
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Alas, Britain's decline as a Great Power meant a role in the distant and by now rather irrelevant Indian Ocean was beyond its capacity. In 1968 Harold Wilson announced that Britain was to withdraw from the Far East, the Arabian Sea and the Gulf by the end of 1971. They left the great naval base at Singapore in 1975, truly marking the end of an era. It is no coincidence that it was in 1971 that the Soviet Union first sent a substantial fleet into the ocean, though they had had a smaller presence for a few years previously. The ocean in fact now became a player, albeit a minor one, in the Cold War.

Writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is already difficult to
appreciate the intensity of feeling generated by the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States as it affected the Indian Ocean. Certainly at the time some academics and serving officers saw a very clear danger. Hanne, writing in the
Military Review
, subtitled the 'Professional Journal of the United States Army', was concerned that the United States had not moved in to fill the vacuum left by the British departure: 'many analysts have stated that the United States, with or without its allies, would have to move a visible naval force into that region to preclude its immediate de facto annexation by the Soviet Union into its "sphere of influence.''' Large areas of the Soviet Union would be within range of American submarines if they were based in the Indian Ocean, but instead, 'Attempting to convince the newly independent powers that security, self-determination and equitable prosperity come from the acceptance of a pro-Soviet foreign policy, the USSR is moving steadily along many fronts, publicly confident in the historic veracity of its ideology.'
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So also from the defence analyst Patrick Wall in his edited book
The Indian Ocean and the Threat to the West
. He complained that the West 'is watching supinely while the world's greatest land power [that is, the Soviet Union] starts to dominate the sea as well.' Instead of doing something about this, 'Leftward-leaning Western Governments enthusiastically abuse, and try to boycott, South Africa and Rhodesia. At the same time, without seeing any inconsistency, they advocate an expansion of trade and close cultural links with the Soviet Union and her satellites.' It was a matter for regret that 'Few, if any, African states can really be called pro-Western. The majority are unaligned but responsive to Soviet, and Chinese, penetration.... Lenin believed that the Western democracies would destroy themselves from within through becoming soft, greedy, and lacking in will power. He may yet prove to have been right.'
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Scary stuff, but perhaps appropriately I bought my copy of this book at a stall. The stamp inside said 'Discarded'.