The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [217]
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.82
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.83
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.84
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.85 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.86 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