Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (35 page)

Meanwhile, sensing an opportunity, China began supplying Sri Lanka with more and more arms and ammunition. Chinese fire-fighting radar was bad compared to that of the U.S., but at least parts were available. Military aid from Beijing was soon top to bottom: the assault rifles in evidence at military roadblocks were Chinese T-56 knockoffs of Russian AK-47s. China also had Sri Lanka’s back at the U.N. Security Council whenever the Western powers wanted to condemn it. China was providing slots for Sri Lankan officers at its war and staff colleges. As in Uzbekistan and Nepal, where the curtailment of political freedoms had caused the West to downsize its relationships, the Chinese were seriously upgrading theirs.

Other military and economic aid was coming from Pakistan, Iran, former Soviet states, Libya, and Israel even, which was supplying the Sri Lankan navy with Dvora patrol boats. Buoyed by the non-Western half of the world that was less obsessed with human rights concerns, military progress against the Tamil Tigers accelerated in 2008 as the army stood up new divisions and special operations task forces. Safe in the knowledge of China’s firm backing, the Sri Lankan military moved forward methodically and patiently, not driven by any political timetable,
devolving power to its officers in the field. Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan navy sank Tamil Tiger mother ships, or floating warehouses, in the Indian Ocean to the southeast. It was an impressive show, except for the utter lack of a hearts-and-minds element toward ethnic Tamils by an army recruited from the poorest inland villages of the Sinhalese heartland. Indeed, there was little thought of building schools or digging water wells for the Tamils. It was total war with civilians caught in the middle as hostages in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Victory and the deaths of more than a thousand Sinhalese troops in the fighting of 2008 and 2009 put the government in no mood to compromise. Defense secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa made official visits to China, Russia, and Israel. With a loan from Libya, oil from Iran, and the Chinese building and financing the state-of-the-art seaport at Hambantota, the West simply had less and less leverage.

Partly because of Chinese strategic concerns, Sri Lanka was able to win a war while rejecting the West. And though the defeat of a group like the Tamil Tigers is certainly something to be welcomed, it was achieved in a manner that demonstrates how the rise of China in Asia and Africa carries with it troubling repercussions for the states and regimes affected. The decline of the West in maritime Asia, while a wholly natural and in some sense benign occurrence in the wider span of history—given the trauma caused since da Gama’s voyage—will not be altogether beneficial. As we have seen, Chinese military aid does not come with lectures about human rights the way the West’s does. China does not interfere in another state’s internal politics and does not tolerate interference in its own. Chinese foreign policy, without being in any way extreme or bellicose, nevertheless represents the bleakest form of realism. It indicates a new bipolarity in the world: between those states that employ human rights as part of their policy calculations and those that do not.

Yet, despite being crucial to Sri Lanka’s destruction of the Tamil Tigers, China cannot be wholly triumphant here for the simple reason that political geography locates Sri Lanka within the shadow of India. Yes, there was the disastrous 1987 intervention of the Indian military, in which India essentially invaded Sri Lanka in order to defend ethnic Tamils and ended up fighting the Tamil Tigers, who would not tolerate any power other than their own. Nevertheless, today India enjoys better relations with Sri Lanka than it does with other large and immediate neighbors such as Pakistan
and Bangladesh.
*
Owing to a 1998 free trade agreement, Sri Lankan trade with India is substantial: India dominates imports to Sri Lanka and is Sri Lanka’s third largest export market.
^†
India’s natural sway over Sri Lanka is so explicit that at the time of independence, Sri Lanka signed a defense pact with Great Britain out of fear of an Indian invasion (as would happen in the cases of Hyderabad and Goa on the Indian mainland). As we have seen, India may be bedeviled by semi-failed states on its borders, but at the same time those states, as irascible as they can be, must make their own geopolitical calculations in reference to India. For example, Pakistan’s support of Islamic extremism in Afghanistan is fully explained by its desire to erect an Islamistan of sorts deep into Central Asia with which to confront India. Thus, Sri Lanka’s new pro-Chinese tilt is, at the end of the day, only relative; for especially as the Indian-Chinese maritime rivalry heats up Sri Lanka will have to maneuver delicately between the two giants in order to achieve a kind of functional nonalignment. Sri Lanka, with its growing and increasingly influential Muslim minority, its political war debt to China, and its proximity to India, is the ultimate register of geopolitical trends in the Indian Ocean region.

Nonetheless, India, pointed out Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, is itself compromised in its relations with Sri Lanka, less because of its failed intervention in 1987 than because of the signal fact of Tamilnadu, the Indian state practically adjoining Sri Lanka, which is the ethnic homeland of Sri Lanka’s embattled minority Tamils. Because of political pressure from Tamilnadu exerted on politicians in New Delhi, India must strive to support Sri Lanka’s Tamils, even as it competes with China and Pakistan for friendship with Colombo’s Sinhalese authorities. But as Saravanamuttu went on to say, India’s very tangled and troubled relationship with the island makes a solution to the Sinhalese-Tamil dispute crucial to its interests. True ethnic reconciliation in Sri Lanka is an Indian goal more than a Chinese one.

In the spring of 2009, the methodical government offensive intensified in take-no-prisoners style. The war was declared over on May 18, when
Prabakharan’s body was displayed on television, as the last few hundred yards of Tamil Tiger territory were taken. The next morning, safely out of jail from my trespassing scrap, I drove through the southern coastal heartland of the Sinhalese. Everywhere there were parades and flag-bedecked, horn-honking rickshaw convoys, with young men, many of them unemployed, shouting and setting off masses of firecrackers. Posters of President Rajapaksa were everywhere. Villagers lined the roads offering free food served on palm leaves to passersby. Prabakharan’s body was dragged and burned in effigy. In the case of the young men, I sensed a scary and wanton boredom in their actions, as if the same crowds, under different circumstances, could be setting fire to Tamil homes, as had happened in earlier decades. It was noteworthy that the closer I got to the ethnically mixed population center of Colombo, the demonstrations were less in evidence.

Yet it truly was an event to celebrate. Prabakharan had been causing death and destruction to a much greater extent and for a much longer period than Osama bin Laden in the case of the United States. This was the kind of clear-cut, demonstrable victory that any American administration could only hope for, even as the methods used by the Sri Lankan government to attain it could—and should—never be replicated by the U.S.

That same morning I stopped in the town of Tangalla to watch Rajapaksa’s victory speech to the parliament broadcast on national television. Gathered before a large screen especially arranged for the event were hundreds of people waving the distinctive Sri Lankan flag: a lion against a maroon background symbolizing the Sinhalese, with smaller orange and green stripes for the Tamil and Muslim communities. It seemed at first a brilliant Machiavellian performance: be absolutely ruthless in war and generous in victory. After gutting the rights of ethnic Tamils and of the media for years, Rajapaksa spoke repeatedly of national reconciliation. He began his speech not in Sinhala but in Tamil. He talked of an ethnically united country: “We must all live as one.” Moreover, he mentioned development, education, and health care for the Tamil minority. In the past he had spoken thus in international forums, but never so humanely and comprehensively before a domestic audience. Though no specific programs were announced, there seemed more hope than there had been in years that Sri Lanka was on the path to national recovery.

On the other hand, he had no apologies or remorse for the victims of
the war. He would promise the Buddhist monks in Kandy several days later that “our motherland will never be divided [again].” Furthermore, he told them that there were only two types of Sri Lankans, those who love the motherland and those who do not. And yet democracy, as imperfect as it is, has a way of working wonders. Months later, in order to win a national election, Rajapaksa had no choice but to court the Tamil minority. And that, in turn, led the Buddhist leader to do such things as offer public prayer at a Hindu temple. The religious divide in Sri Lanka was never as wide as the ethnic one, and the ethnic one could be bridged, it turned out. With the Christian Prabakharan dead, Sri Lanka now looked set to enter a new and productive phase of history. The diplomats and NGO officials I had met during my visit were by and large skeptical about Rajapaksa’s ability to reform himself. But one hoped that their pessimism was misplaced. And if it was, we can thank democracy for it.

As we’ve seen, it was the Chinese who had partly allowed this victory to happen, since for the West, to its credit, not even the most desirable of ends could justify certain means. Yet, as morally uncomfortable as it may be to countenance, the Chinese aid model does have its logic. In his 1968 classic,
Political Order in Changing Societies
, the late Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington points out what Thomas Hobbes and Walter Lippmann had observed earlier, that authority, even of a brutal kind, is preferable to none at all.
Oh, how we have learned that lesson in Iraq!
While we in the West scan the developing world for moral purity, decrying corruption in backward societies, the Chinese are content with stability, no matter how illegitimately conceived. Our foreign aid emphasis is on democracy, human rights, and civil society; theirs is on massive infrastructure projects and authority, civil or not.

We should keep in mind that our goals have been determined by our own unique historical experience, which, as Huntington notes, has been about limiting the power of authority, since our institutional practices were imported easily from seventeenth-century England, whereas much of the rest of the world has had to build a legitimate authority from scratch.
¹⁹
Thus, America’s historical experience is not always irrelevant to many of the very countries that will be at center stage in the new century. Weak, unresponsive, or nonexistent government institutions define significant swathes of geography, as we are still living, and will be for some more decades, with the aftermath of the dismantlement of
European empires that have exposed regimes in Eurasia and Africa to the rigors of modernity.

The competition between the development models of America and China is, of course, most pronounced in Africa, at the western end of the Indian Ocean, but it is Burma where I next want to turn, a place where not only the United States and China, but India, too, is deeply involved. Burma will be as pivotal to the Bay of Bengal region as Pakistan will be to the Arabian Sea. Whereas Pakistan is akin to the Balkans, with its tendency for dissolution, Burma is like early-twentieth-century Belgium, with its tendency to be overrun by great contiguous powers.
²⁰

M
onsoon clouds crushed the dark, seaweed green landscape of eastern Burma. The steep hillsides glistened with teak, coconut palms, black and ocher mud from the heavy rains, and tall, chaotic grasses. When night fell, the loud buzz saw of cicadas and the pestering croaks of geckos competed with the downpour. I stumbled on three bamboo planks over a fast-moving stream into Burma, guided by an ethnic Karen soldier with a torchlight attached by naked copper wires to an ancient six-volt battery slung around his neck. The danger was less Burmese government troops than the Thai military. Because of logging and other commercial interests, the democratically elected government of Thailand at the time was a close friend of the military regime in Burma. The Thai prime minister Samak Sundaravej had said that the ruling Burmese generals are “good Buddhists” who like to meditate, and that Burma is a country that “lives in peace.” Thus, the Thai military was on the lookout for Karen soldiers who as a minority hill tribe have been fighting successive Burmese regimes since 1948.

“It ended in Vietnam, in Cambodia. When will it end in Burma?” asked Saw Roe Key, a Karen I met as soon as I had crossed the border, who lost a leg to a toe-popper anti-personnel mine. It was the kind of mine with which the military regime has littered villages throughout the hill tracts of Burma, which cover 40 percent of the country, and where more than a half dozen ethnic groups, including the Karen, have long been in some stage of revolt. Of about two dozen Karens I met at an outpost just inside Burma, four were missing a leg from a mine. They were otherwise a motley collection. Some wore green camouflage fatigues, and were armed with M-16s and AK-47s; most were in T-shirts and traditional skirts
(longyis)
. The outpost was a jumble of wooden plank huts on stilts, roofed with dried teak leaves, and built into a hillside under the forest canopy. It was continually being devoured by beetles, malarial mosquitoes, and other insects, yet was equipped with a solar panel and an ingenious water system. Beyond it beckoned perfectly rugged guerrilla country at a strategic junction of the Indian Ocean world. Here in this jungle was not only where anti-regime ethnic guerrillas and the Burmese government collided, but where an India looking eastward and a China looking southward did, too.