America’s war of choice on Iran has spread across the Indian Ocean world and maritime Silk Route. Starved of oil and gas, South and South-East Asia’s emerging economies have seen local currencies fall against the exorbitantly privileged US $ as public and private debt increased with soaring energy costs.
The US fifth fleet’s occupation and blockade of Indian Ocean trade routes targeting the Strait of Hormuz has shown the importance of the 1971 United Nations (UN) Declaration of the ‘Indian Ocean (IO) as a Zone of Peace (ZP)’ - for global security and prosperity.
Fifty-five years ago, in 1971, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) led by the world’s first female Head of State, Prime Minister Sirima Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike of Ceylon, declared the Indian Ocean a ‘Zone of Peace’. Resolution 2832 (XXV1) affirmed the vast Indian Ocean together with the airspace above and the subjacent ocean floor for all time a ‘Zone of Peace’.
The bold Resolution by Bandaranaike to declare the Indian Ocean a Zone of Peace has never been more relevant. Indeed, de-militarising and de-colonising the Indian Ocean in line with the UNGA Resolution 2832 is vital for sustaining and deepening the 60-day peace pause between Iran and the US brokered by Pakistan and Qatar at this time.
The Indian Ocean, where Iran, sits, is the epicentre of the world’s oldest and wealthiest sea-based trade system. For millennia, the Indian Ocean maritime Silk Route, of which the Strait of Hormuz is an integral part, connected the coastal regions and hinterlands of the super Continent of Asia with Africa and Europe - long before the US came into existence across the Atlantic Ocean in the ‘new world’.
European invaders and empires fought bloody battles to control and colonise Indian Ocean sea lanes from the 16th Century onward, much like the US today which seeks to toll Indian Ocean shipping, wage hybrid economic warfare and stymie the Asian 21st Century.
Strategic islands and waterways like the Malacca Strait and Hormuz are vital to the control of Indian Ocean supply chains and trade routes to access and loot the great wealth of Asian civilisations, particularly, Persia, India and China.
Hence, the UNGA Resolution 2832 establishing the Indian Ocean Zone of Peace (IOZP) was spearheaded by Bandaranaike during the Cold War amid great power rivalry between the Soviet Union/Russia and the US. Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, is geo-strategically located at the centre of the Indian Ocean world’s trade routes and supply chains. It is hence perpetually in the crosshairs of big power rivalry, and subject to neocolonial projects, most recently by the International Monetary Fund.
The IOZP and the UN mandate
The UNGA Declaration of the Indian Ocean as a ‘Zone of Peace’ has never been more relevant to world peace, security, growth and decolonisation, which are the core but seemingly forgotten mandates of the UN.
The declaration of the Indian Ocean a ‘Zone of Peace’ sought to ensure that the world’s busiest trade routes would be free of foreign bases, militarisation, and nuclear weapons during the long Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. Big power rivalry had undermined development and de-colonisation while driving proxy wars in Asia, Africa and South America.
Bandaranaike was joined by stalwarts of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Global South: President Julius Kambarage Nyerere of the United Republic of Tanzania in the western reach of the Indian Ocean joined the UN Resolution 2832 (XXVI). It was a time of Afro-Asian, South-South cooperation. India’s Prime Minister Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi of the Congress Party was a close friend of Bandaranaike and a supporter of Palestine, unlike the current pro-Israeli Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi’s regime in New Delhi.
UNGA Resolution 2832 called upon big powers to enter into consultations with the littoral states of the Indian Ocean with a view to halting the escalation of their military presence and to eliminate all bases, military installations and logistical supply facilities, nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.
In the context, should not the UN Secretary-General (SG) Antonio Manuel de Oliveira Guterres invoke the IOZP Declaration made when Burma’s U Thant was the UNSG and the Buddhist Principles of Panchaseela underlay diplomacy, to call on US President Donald John Trump to remove the marine environment despoiling US fifth fleet armada led by the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln from the Indian Ocean?
To put it bluntly, the current invasion and occupation of the Indian Ocean, far from America’s shores in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, in order to blockade Iran’s Strait of Hormuz and starve Asian countries of energy, violates UNGA Resolution 2832.
US occupation and the colonisation of the Indian Ocean world
The US has used the rhetoric of a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ ironically to militarise and blockade Indian Ocean trade routes and reroute energy supply chains to control markets, benefit corporate interests and prop up the petro-$ as the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa group de-Dollarise. Indeed, Trump’s alternate sanctions on Russian and Iranian oil seem designed to destabilise energy markets and sales. South and South-East Asian countries meanwhile have been forced to buy expensive US oil and gas with $ rather than source cheaper oil from Asian neighbours and pay in local currency.
At this time, it is vital that the US cease and desist from aggression and occupation of Indian Ocean trade routes and plans to toll ships in the Indian Ocean. Rather, the US Armada would best return to the Atlantic Ocean and where it came from to help restore the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace as envisaged by Bandaranaike.
Does the US attempt to occupy and colonise the Indian Ocean, despite Trump’s preference for American isolationism, reflect the deep-State’s post-imperial insecurity given that the US is separate from the super-Continent of Asia (British geographer [Halford John] Mackinder’s heartland theory), by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans? Is the Euro-American North Atlantic Treaty Organisation deep-State anxious about irrelevance in the next Asian Century wherein the Global South with vast populations are increasingly the growth hub of the world?
However, it appears that the legacy of Bandaranaike declaring the IOZP has been forgotten even as UN corridors buzz with debate on the gender/s of the next UNSG as Guterres’ term thankfully draws to an end.
Be that as it may, it is increasingly clear that the next UNSG should be from the Global South and a strong voice for global economic justice. In the final analysis, the gender/s of the next UNSG is irrelevant to making the UN relevant again.
A firm voice for peace and economic justice for the Global South is needed from the august body and is solely missed the world over at this time. Under Guterres, the UN and its agencies which are increasingly corporate funded and captured, have been rather distracted with various staged ‘poly-crises’ - from pandemics to climate change – and seem to have abandoned the primary mandate of peace, security and de-colonisation.
From Greenland to the Chagos Islands: With a little help from Andy Burnham
When the Indian Ocean was declared a Zone of Peace in 1971, the United Kingdom (UK) and the US had forcibly displaced the native population of the Chagos Islands to build the huge Diego Garcia military base. The Chagos Islands, called the British Indian Ocean Territory by some, had been colonised at a time when the Britannia ruled the waves. That was an era of British imperialism when the vast Indian Ocean was referred to as a ‘British lake’ or pond.
Today, there is news that Trump seeks to buy the occupied Chagos Islands from Mauritius, much like Greenland. The huge environment polluting US-UK Diego Garcia military base is located southwest of Sri Lanka and the Maldives Islands.
Any purchase of the Chagos Islands would no doubt need help from the latest British Prime Minister, Andrew Murray Burnham, who supported Anthony Charles Lynton Blair’s Iraq war adventure in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, before doing a volte face.
It was from the Diego Garcia military base that US missiles recently targeted Iran across the Indian Ocean and US airplanes flew bombing missions over Afghanistan during the US global war on terror.
It was only in March 2019 that the International Court of Justice ruled that the UK and US occupation of the Chagos Islands was illegal under international law.
Any sale of the Chagos Islands would also require the Modi Government in New Delhi to turn a blind eye to the US led militarisation of the Indian Ocean at this time. The land locked Modi regime has turned its back on the Indian Ocean world facing South Indian Dravidian states, whose seamen have died due to the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. So too has Indian External Affairs Minister Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar ignored the IOZP Declaration, and preferred to sign up to the US led new security architecture in the Indian Ocean and related environment polluting war games such as the Malabar exercises which caused whales and dolphins to die en mass in Sri Lanka in 2022. The new US led military security architecture of the Indian Ocean clearly targeting China and Iran, includes the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (India, Japan, Australia and the US), and the I2U2 group (Israel, India, the United Arab Emirates and the US). India remains excluded from the white racist nuclear submarine club AUKUS comprised of Australia, the UK and the US, targeting China.
From Chagos Islands to Sri Lanka
Spearheading the UNGA Declaration of the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace in 1971, Bandaranaike was acutely aware of the geostrategic location of her country in the Indian Ocean world’s trade and energy supply chains.
Sri Lanka has been called an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ and valuable real estate in the Indian Ocean. An Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development ‘donor darling’, the country, although the wealthiest in South Asia by all metrics except the exorbitantly privileged $, is now Euro-bond debt trapped and bleeding sovereignty to the Washington Consensus. The country is clearly in the crosshairs of big power rivalry also given Chinese investments in the teardrop Island, particularly the Hambantota Port which the US Central Intelligence Agency has deemed one of the “string of pearls” harbours.
Thus, in the first week of March and America’s illegal war on Iran and the Indian Ocean world, the US torpedoed an Iranian frigate killing 85 sailors in the seas of Sri Lanka. The Sri Lanka Navy (SLN) was able to save some of the Iranian survivors of the sunken IRIS Dena and aided the humanitarian rescue to mitigate the US war crime in Sri Lanka’s maritime Exclusive Economic Zone.
Yet, there were few protests when the US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Dr Samir Paul Kapur declared the SLN a partner of the US Indo-Pacific strategy last week.
Dr Kapur, a member of the weaponised Indo-American diaspora, delivered satellite technology and 10 helicopters, poisoned gifts to the geostrategic country, no doubt to help the US war machine to surveil, monitor and torpedo as necessary Indian Ocean shipping lanes from Sri Lanka — no doubt in the next bout of war on Iran and China once the 60 day pause is done.
Meanwhile, the fake left National People’s Power regime in Colombo has kept a deadly, deathly silence about US war crimes in the Indian Ocean – betraying socialist Prime Minister Bandaranaike’s bold vision for Peace at the centre of the Indian Ocean world.
It is nevertheless to be hoped that Prime Minister Dr Harini Nireka Amarasuriya would try to live up to the legacy of her predecessor who declared the ‘Indian Ocean a Zone of Peace for all time’ with great prescience 55 years ago.
The writer is a social and medical anthropologist
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The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication