Columns

In the couple of days between the writing of this column and its appearance today, what will happen to the world is anybody’s guess. Whether this war, which the adversaries have called a halt to for a breather, I presume, will lead to a ‘finis’ is hard to predict.

True, a war that has been raging for a few months has suddenly been silenced. The wannabe Napoleon who threatened to send his adversarial Iran back to the Stone Age is possibly looking for sticks and stones to throw at an ancient nation; in a way of speaking, he is more an upstart of a political leader who thinks that his word is law and has been made to bite the dust.

Right now he is prepared to hide himself. None of his threats, bombast and philistine hostility that he has flung at friend and foe in recent times appears to have exhausted him. Perhaps after all the oscillation between clarity and senility. He had to concede to a two-week stoppage of the war, which he and his stooge leader on the other side of the Gaza Strip joined hands in waging war.

Donald Trump is steering the ship, which he seems to perceive as his personal piece of wreckage after he laid his hands on it. Right now he believes it belongs to nobody but him and will castigate anybody near or far with his weaponised stupidity.

So where he is today is not where he will be tomorrow as reality begins to strike him and he takes one step forward and two steps back. If that is the furthest he is ready to retreat in a day, then probably he is ready to join those he is ready to send to the Stone Age. Who knows what happens with unstable men when they assume leadership without the characteristics of leadership.

But at least the news so far is surely more gratifying than the pompous words of people some would love to dismiss as plutocratic buffoons who have vowed they would blow up Iran to pieces and grab the Strait of Hormuz as though it was a permanent gift for their Spartacus-like chivalry.

Since many analysts and observers would have their say in the coming days, let me turn to a subject I have been writing on often from around 1964, shortly after I entered journalism.

It was coincidental in a way, for Sri Lanka (then Ceylon,) a prominent member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), was taking a keen interest in the growing presence of the two superpowers – the US and the Soviet Union – in the Indian Ocean, more so when the Vietnam War was heating up and Indian Ocean littoral states and those further afield were involved in various levels of engagement.

Those who recall the geopolitical situation at the time will remember that Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike had lost the 1964 election but had committed Ceylon to the NAM, like many recently independent states and those struggling to free themselves from colonial legacies.

Though Dudley Senanayake of the pro-Western UNP came to power as prime minister, he did maintain an independent demeanour which seemed a continuation of a nonaligned policy during his time.

In 1967, when some Southeast Asian countries were preparing to set up a regional organisation during the Vietnam War, Malaysian Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman invited Prime Minister Senanayake to join what they were hoping to begin, an Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Mr Senanayake was on an official visit to Kuala Lumpur when Tunku Rahman offered Ceylon a place in ASEAN. Mr Senanayake left without committing himself.

When he returned to Colombo, I asked him at a press briefing why he turned down a founder membership in ASEAN. His immediate response was that they should think it over.

On the several occasions I accompanied Mr Senanayake on his agricultural tours across the country, I used to keep harking back to the ASEAN story. One evening we were seated in the Verandah of a state guest house listening to tales of his days at S. Thomas’ College, Mt Lavinia, which was long before my time. I took the opportunity to talk about politics and turn the conversation to the government dropping the ASEAN offer.

In quite a candid response, Prime Minister Senanayake said that had ASEAN been a genuine economic organisation, he would have had little hesitation in accepting the offer.

But to Dudley Senanayake, who was quite an astute ‘student’ of international affairs, ASEAN was created as a bulwark against the feared expansion of Chinese communism in Asia. Since it was very much an American-sponsored organisation and he did not want any role in it.

Here was a prime minister from a pro-Western political party running the country but quite averse to lending itself to American diktats or policies, with the region already divided on geostrategic interests while the two superpowers were already involved in war-torn Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

For many decades I tried to follow the spreading US-British hold over the presence of the military base in Diego Garcia and the claim of Mauritius for the ownership of the Chagos Archipelago and what these developments would mean to India and Sri Lanka.

With Sri Lanka and India strategically placed – Sri Lanka more than India because of its vulnerable position – big powers traversing the major sea routes in the Indian Ocean could spell danger to us.

So vulnerable was Sri Lanka, which now had Mrs Bandaranaike back in power, that it used its presence in NAM to launch a strong campaign to call for creating a peace zone in the Indian Ocean and shut out the two superpowers and other powers carrying strategic weapons from using the Indian Ocean demarcated as a “peace zone”.

Sri Lanka, with the support of Tanzania, moved a resolution in the UNGA in 1971. With a considerable majority approving it, Sri Lanka got it through.

This was the time when Sri Lanka had an important role to play in the international arena, for Colombo even hosted the 6th Non-Aligned Summit attended by some of the leaders of the movement, such as Yugoslavia’s Josef Broz Tito, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, India’s Indira Gandhi, and many others.

There is much more to be said, especially when the NAM gradually lost its power and influence when one of the two superpowers imploded and the use of the Indian Ocean by the Russian military subsided considerably.

On the other hand, the US moved very much from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean as China’s naval presence increased and a new confrontation was building up.

But my real concern is over the military build-up in the strategic regions of this highly active seaway and what Sri Lanka’s genuine foreign policy is and what the myriads of treaties we have entered into are.

So we need to search into these MoUs since governments are often reluctant to divulge them.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran
Sri Lankan journalist who was assistant editor, diplomatic editor and political columnist of the Hong Kong Standard before moving to London, where he worked for Gemini News Service. Later he was Deputy Chief of Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London before returning to journalism.)