Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Azmi Thassim, head of the local chamber of commerce, who proudly told me the story of Leonard Woolf in Hambantota, insisted that the seaport project was a Sri Lankan and not a Chinese one. He noted that Hambantota’s strategic maritime position and deep depths close to shore had made it an ideal place for a new port for decades; in fact, the Canadians had been involved for a time in the drawing-board phase before the Chinese and Sri Lankans initialed their far-reaching deal in 2007. “We lack the funds and expertise, and, therefore, looked for foreign support.” Hambantota, he said, also had plans for a conference center and a new airport in which the Chinese likely would not be involved, just as once the seaport was completed, the Chinese probably would not be the ones operating it.

  The chamber leader is right in an important sense. China’s move into the Indian Ocean constitutes less an aggressive example of empire building than a subtle grand strategy to take advantage of legitimate commercial opportunities wherever they might arise in places that matter to its military and economic interests. China is adroitly riding a wave of economic history rather than plotting it out in the first place. As in Gwadar, where the Port of Singapore Authority will be managing a Chinese-built port, China will have at least one layer of separation between its goals and ground-level reality. China does not need to run any harbor. It requires only state-of-the-art port and bunkering facilities for its merchant fleet and possibly its warships in places where Beijing works hard to maintain excellent diplomatic and military relations. Hambantota and other such ports will constitute flow-through centers where vast quantities of Chinese manufactured goods destined for Middle East, South Asian, and Southeast Asian markets can be temporarily stored. Thus, Hambantota is emblematic of China’s budding yet exquisitely elusive empire, built on soft power.2

  In the world of late antiquity, Ceylon—strategically located at the hinge between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea—was the entrepôt between China and the Middle East. As George Hourani writes, Chinese ships used to sail as far west as Ceylon, and from Ceylon westward trade was in the hands of the Persians and Axumites (from present-day Ethiopia).3 Chinese admiral Zheng He broke that pattern by using Ceylon as a base for sailing as far west as the Horn of Africa, making two trips to the island. He erected a trilingual tablet here in 1410 that was unearthed exactly five hundred years later near Galle, close to the southernmost point of Sri Lanka and the Indian Subcontinent. The message inscribed in Chinese, Persian, and Tamil invoked the blessings of the Hindu deities for a peaceful world built on trade. The year before, the Chinese had invaded Ceylon and made their way as far as the Buddhist hill capital of Kandy, where they captured the Sinhalese king and queen and members of the court as retribution for not handing over a sacred relic—a tooth of the Buddha—some years earlier.4

  The Chinese occupied Ceylon for thirty years in the fifteenth century. This was before the European assault that would include occupations by the Portuguese, Dutch, and British, a historical epoch that ended only in the mid-twentieth century. The fact that the Chinese got here before the island fell under western tutelage makes China’s current policy in Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean compatible with local history, and the expensive commemoration in Beijing of Zheng He’s voyages demonstrates that is how the Chinese themselves view it.

  China’s activities in Sri Lanka reveal that China, in the words of one Indian naval officer, is ready to “drop anchor at India’s southern doorstep.” China is involved in building a billion-dollar development zone in Hambantota that features the deepwater harbor that I saw being constructed, in addition to a fuel-bunkering facility, oil refinery, and other infrastructure that the chamber leader did not mention.5 The complex may one day be used as a refueling and docking station for China’s navy as it patrols the Indian Ocean and protects Chinese supplies of Saudi Arabian oil. Amid the Indian Ocean’s key sea lines of communication, Hambantota is in the same part of the island near where Zheng He’s fleet landed six hundred years earlier. With India constrained in providing military assistance to the Buddhist Sinhalese government in the capital of Colombo because of the political sensitivities of its own Hindu Tamil population, China, along with Pakistan, has been filling the gap. China has supplied Sri Lanka with fighter aircraft, armored personnel carriers, anti-aircraft guns, air surveillance radar, missiles, and rocket-propelled grenades. China’s aid to Sri Lanka jumped from a few million dollars in 2005 to $1 billion in 2008; by comparison, the United States gave only $7.4 million. The U.S. suspended military aid in 2007 over the human rights abuses of the Sinhalese government in its civil war against ethnic Tamils; China, which is also involved in gas exploration here, as well as the building of a coal power plant at a cost of $455 million, has had no such moral qualms.6

  Whereas European colonialism ended just over sixty years ago, and while the U.S. is distracted elsewhere, China has now returned to this island at the core of Indian Ocean trade routes. Its military assistance, including six F-7 fighter jets free of charge, was crucial in ending the military stalemate with the Tamil rebels in favor of the Sri Lankan government.7 Though the U.S. has relatively ignored Sri Lanka as an island in India’s geographical orbit that is far from the Middle East, the Chinese correctly see it as key to twenty-first-century sea lines of communication around the Asian rimland. So as the Americans labor in Afghanistan, the Chinese are quietly constructing ports along the Indian Ocean littoral. And even if the American labor succeeds, that will only mean a Central Asia connected by pipelines to the Indian Ocean, creating an economically pulsing new world order that China will be poised to take further advantage of.

  And yet China’s challenge will ultimately be the same as America’s, for as much as China has helped Sri Lanka (and Pakistan, too, for that matter), there is no guarantee that China will have ready access to the very port facilities it is building. It will all depend on the political circumstances between China and the host country at the desired moment. China might eventually find itself in the same frustrating position as the United States, with ports and bases it cannot use in time of need because of unforeseen political tensions. This, again, is the real lesson of the Indian Ocean world: nuanced relationships rather than overt alliances and basing arrangements. I note China’s deep involvement in Sri Lanka because that is what I see happening on the ground, but there is little reason for the West to be paranoid about it.

  Throughout the twenty-six-year-long civil war here Western strategists had found themselves in a deep moral quandary regarding Sri Lanka, a place that for a generation constituted a human rights catastrophe even as it figures prominently in new geopolitical calculations. Therefore, as Sri Lanka grows in importance in this Indian Ocean–centric world, it is time now to rescue the island from the relative obscurity it has suffered at the hands of the American media.8

  The very word “Ceylon,” so formal and elegant, though a mispronunciation of a Portuguese name, conjures up the most rarefied of paradises. And the landscape, with its sprawling seaboard, pristine forests, and glistening tea plantations, as well as the soaring-to-heaven whiteness of its Buddhist stupas surely does not disappoint. Medieval Arab seafarers called this island that hangs like a pear-shaped teardrop off the southeastern extremity of India “Serendip,” or “island of jewels,” which allowed an eighteenth-century English writer to coin the word “serendipity.” Sri Lanka, the Sinhala name by which the island has been known since 1972, means “resplendent land.”

  But Sri Lanka is one of those benighted places—one thinks of Cyprus, Kosovo, Nagorno Karabakh—not altogether uncommon to the developing world, whereby the earth is magnificent even as the actions of its human inhabitants have too often been small-minded and ugly. And in each of these places, wholly fresh historical complexities riddle the political landscape, making the possibility of engineering a solution as difficult as finding one’s way out of a maze. There is a perversity about the local history of recent decades that suggests it is the very isolation imposed by an island geography, as well as the sect
ioning of the landscape by hills and mountains—the very features that make Sri Lanka so beautiful—that contribute to the paranoia and narrow-mindedness which has been the hallmark of politics here.

  The majority Buddhist Sinhalese, who constitute more than three quarters of Sri Lanka’s population of twenty million, have lived in fear of being overwhelmed by the Hindu Tamils, who, though composing only 18 percent of the population, can theoretically call upon their sixty million ethnic and religious compatriots living just across the Palk Strait in southeastern India. The history of Tamil invasions against the only homeland that the Sinhalese possess is not just the stuff of ancient history, but a living reality reinforced by the Tamil terrorism of the present era. Writes the Sri Lankan scholar K. M. de Silva:

  Sri Lanka’s location off the coast of South India, and specifically its close proximity to [the Indian state of] Tamilnadu, separated by a shallow and narrow stretch of sea serves to accentuate this sense of a minority status among the Sinhalese. Their own sense of ethnic distinctiveness is identified through religion—Theravada Buddhism—and language—Sinhala. They take pride in the fact that Buddhism thrives in Sri Lanka while it has practically disappeared in its original home, India. Their language, Sinhala, has its roots in classical Indian languages, but it is now a distinctly Sri Lankan language, and one that is not spoken anywhere else.9

  Indeed, there is a sense of historical destiny among Sinhalese, de Silva writes: of preserving Theravada Buddhism under a Hindu revivalist assault, with southern India the source of scores of these invasions. It is as if the Buddhist Sinhalese were a lonely people, with few ethnic compatriots anywhere, who had been pushed to their last bastion, the southern two thirds of Sri Lanka, by the demographic immensity of largely Hindu India. Therefore, the Sinhalese must fight for every mile of their ethnic homeland, Bradman Weerakoon, an advisor to former Sri Lankan presidents and prime ministers, told me. Adding to the feeling that the majority Buddhist Sinhalese have of being perennially under siege by the more entrepreneurial and dynamic minority-Hindu Tamils is the feeling of religious oppression sustained under the rule of the various European colonial powers, beginning with Christian Portugal, and continuing through the mid-twentieth century with the Dutch and British.10

  As a result, like the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia and the Shiites in Iran, the Sinhalese are a demographic majority with a dangerous minority complex of persecution. If one may generalize, the Buddhist Sinhalese are less austere and contemplative than other Buddhists; they are militant religionists with a blood-and-soil identity. This identity harks back to the breathtaking architectural and sculptural residue of twenty-three hundred years of Buddhist worship, with its brassware, garish costumes, silver and gold objects, and resplendent statues in red and gold; artistic traditions that arrived here from India as part of the missionary activity of the great Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century B.C. Buddhism, just like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other faiths, Western and Eastern alike, while principally dedicated to a spiritual and thus nonviolent calling, can become an instigator of violence and hatred in specific circumstances, when ethnicity, struggle over territory, and political ideology are put into the mix. (Repeat: this is not an Eastern failing, for Western religions have been just as guilty in the course of history. And remember that while I refer throughout to Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils, for they constitute the broad outlines of the war, in fact, much of the violence has been perpetrated by Christians, and specifically Catholics, on both sides. Indeed, Christians have numbered among the key terrorists and suicide bombers.)

  For their part, the Hindu Tamils have been labeled a minority with a majority complex, owing to the triumph of Hinduism over Buddhism in southern India in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. The subsequent invasions from India’s south against the rich and thriving Buddhist city-state of Anuradhapura in north-central Sri Lanka resulted in the creation by the thirteenth century of a Tamil kingdom of its own that, in turn, helped lay the groundwork for Tamil majorities in the north and east of the island today.11

  The post-independence experience of this country, including a quarter century of civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils, has borne out the worst fears of both communities. The Sinhalese have had to deal with a Tamil guerrilla insurgency every bit as vicious and suicidal as the better known ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. For their part, the Tamils have had to deal with coercion, discrimination, and the utter failure of largely Sinhalese government institutions to protect their communal rights. As Weerakoon and others explain, Sri Lanka is an example of how democracy can be used, over the course of decades, for the expression of the rights of an oppressive ethnic majority rather than, as we in the West understand it, for the rights of the individual.

  From as early as a few years following independence in 1948, the Sinhalese and Tamils were at each other’s throats. In the 1950s the Sinhalese demonstrated against the government’s granting of Tamil minority rights, only to have the Tamils demonstrate after the government backed down from that very pledge. Tamil mobs and gangs attacked Sinhalese homes and shops in the north of the country and Sinhalese did the same to Tamil neighborhoods in the southwest. Meanwhile, government security forces became less and less professional, and in the 1960s more Sinhalese-nationalist in outlook. The Sinhalese government made Tamils scapegoats for its own failures, while promoting Sinhala as the sole official language. Preferential treatment in all public spheres was given to the Sinhalese community: Not only the security forces, but the civil service became dominated by the ethnic majority. Electoral districts were drawn to give overbearing influence to rural Sinhalese.12

  By the mid-1960s, the model of a secular, multi-ethnic state had been discarded in favor of a Sinhalese one, with Buddhism raised to the status of a state religion and the Hindu Tamils largely disenfranchised. Ironically, this occurred with the connivance of a democratic system that never descended into dictatorship. Sinhalese politicians, including Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who in 1960 became the world’s first woman prime minister, remained beholden to the mood of the majority, instead of working to rise above it. Supporting this descent into communal intolerance was the greater part of Buddhist monks who, in the manner of a medieval clergy, have enjoyed the uses of political power and look back to a past when they were the rousing nationalist force behind Ceylonese kings.

  Nevertheless, poor economic conditions that included rising oil prices left hordes of Sinhalese youth either unemployed or with limited opportunities, and the result was a guerrilla movement that in the late 1960s and 1970s espoused an ideology that combined Buddhist nationalism with Marxism. Strikes and demonstrations gave way to inter-communal killings. A Marxist-nationalist insurrection in 1971 led to fifteen thousand dead, and one in 1989 that could be likened to Peru’s Shining Path insurgency carried a death toll of fifty-five thousand. Women, children, and handicapped people numbered heavily among the victims. It was truly unspeakable. The ability of security forces to end it decisively was what ultimately gave the military two decades later the self-confidence it needed to defeat the Tamil insurrectionists.

  By the 1970s the security forces had been hardened into a ruthless criminal organization in their own right. The American scholar John Richardson writes in his book about Sri Lanka, Paradise Poisoned, of the emblematic case of a young woman, Premawathi Menamperi, in a Sinhalese district in the extreme south of the island in 1970, who had been taken into police custody for alleged ties to a radical Marxist organization. She was stripped, reportedly raped a number of times, then marched naked through the town where she had reigned as a New Year’s festival queen, before being shot to death by a policeman’s submachine gun. Sri Lanka may have been a democracy, but a mere two decades after achieving statehood it was no longer a civil society.

  This was an era when the elected government itself was drifting toward Titoism and other milder variants of Soviet communism. Meanwhile, in 1972, a certain Vellupilai Prabakharan founded the Tamil New Tigers, whose name late
r became known by journalists around the world as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE): Tamil Tigers for short. Prabakharan, a Christian actually, is another illustration of human agency, of how despite the tragic record of inter-communal conflict between Sinhalese and Tamils, the civil war might not have been ignited in the first place, or at least might have unfolded differently, had one man—Prabakharan—not existed. Prabakharan, who would develop into one of the world’s most hunted terrorists, as well as one of its most feared and capable guerrilla leaders, was a product of two overriding factors: the rank discrimination against Tamils and a particularly wayward middle-class youth. His fertile young mind devoured books about Napoleon’s campaigns, even as he pored through comic books and listened to political discussions by his father’s side about the ill treatment meted out by the Sinhalese government to his fellow Tamils. His heroes were Clint Eastwood, the legendary Tamil warrior Veerapandia Kattabomman, and Subash Chandra Bose, the Bengali Indian nationalist who rejected Gandhi’s pacifism and joined forces with the German Nazis and Japanese fascists to fight the British in India.

  The young Prabakharan killed animals with a slingshot and air gun, and practiced making homemade bombs. He stuck pins under his nails to increase his stamina for pain, and killed insects with needles to prepare himself to torture the enemy. In the beginning, he led the Tamil Tigers in robberies to raise money for training camps in remote jungle locations, where the screening of candidates was painstaking. “You intellectuals are afraid of blood,” he scolded the academic community in Sri Lanka’s northern Tamil city of Jaffna. “No struggle will take place without killings.” Ironically, the Sinhalese-dominated security services fulfilled his wishes. Small-scale killings carried out by the Tigers resulted in massive police reprisals against Tamil refugees, aided by Sinhalese thugs. By the early 1980s, decades of inter-communal hatred and democratic misrule had brought Sri Lanka to the verge of a cataclysm.13