UK took our homes; US killed our dogs

September 10, 2011, 5:39 pm

By Padraig Colman

When I look from the balcony of my favorite hotel, the Light House in Galle, I see an empty expanse of sea and think there is no more land until Antarctica. Looking at a map, I realise that travelling in a certain direction southwards one would encounter The Maldives and beyond them the Chagos Archipelago, 900 miles from Sri Lanka.

At a recent symposium, Defeat War Crimes Conspiracy, held at BMICH, Gomin Dayasri called attention to the crimes of the UK and the USA, including their disgraceful treatment of the islanders of Diego Garcia. The UK and the USA conspired to evict the inhabitants to make room for a US military base.

The biggest of the 60 Chagos Islands is Diego Garcia which measures a mere 27.20 km; the total land area of the archipelago is only 63.17 km. The islands were uninhabited until the late 18th century. The first inhabitants were lepers transported by the French from Mauritius. Then the French came up with a cunning plan to make a profit out of the islands. These are sometimes called the Oil Islands because the French produced vast quantities of oil from the coconut plantations they established. There are scant details about conditions then but it is probable that most of the workers were slaves imported from Africa and South India (rather like the British importing Tamils into Ceylon to grow coffee, tea and rubber on land stolen from the natives, and Irish slaves sent to the West Indies to tend the sugar crop).

By the mid-1950s there were around 2,000 inhabitants remaining, even though the market for the oil plantations had collapsed. It was, by many accounts, a Spartan life but a happy one in an idyllic place. Rita David recalls, "Life there paid little money, a very little…but it was the sweet life." Sir Hilary Blood, former colonial governor of Mauritius wrote: "How lovely! Coconut palms against the bluest of skies, their foliage blown by the wind into a perfect circle…Its beauty is infinite."

Unfortunately for the islanders their home attracted the attention of the US military and their British pet poodles. The uninhabited island of Aldabra, near Madagascar was initially considered for use as a military base. However, Aldabra was a breeding ground for a rare species of tortoise. The advantage of choosing Diego Garcia was that Aldabran tortoises could copulate in peace. The fate of 1,800 human Chagossians, or Ilois, who had inhabited the islands for over 200 years was of less import.

In his book Island of Shame, David Vine writes: "Although the British Government and its agents performed most of the physical work involved in displacing the Chagossians, the U.S. Government ordered, orchestrated and financed the expulsion." Vine quotes military analyst John Pike telling him that the U.S. military’s goal is "to run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015, even if the entire Eastern Hemisphere has drop-kicked us from every other base."

The Chagos Islands were detached by the British from the colony of Mauritius in 1965, in breach of international law, before Mauritius was granted independence in 1968. During the 1960s and 1970s British governments, Labour and Tory, tricked and expelled the entire population of the Chagos Archipelago so that Diego Garcia could be given to the United States. UK Foreign Office officials conspired to lie, coaching each other to "maintain" and "argue" the fiction that the Chagossians existed only as a "floating population". There is even doubt about Britain’s right to lease the islands as they may have been illegally acquired from France, which also illegally seized them.

On 28 July 1965, a senior Foreign Office official, T C D Jerrom, wrote to the British representative at the United Nations, instructing him to lie to the General Assembly that the Chagos Archipelago was "uninhabited when the United Kingdom government first acquired it". Nine years later, the Ministry of Defence went further, lying that "there is nothing in our files about inhabitants or about an evacuation".

In March 1971, the commissioner of the British Indian Ocean Territory gave the order for the islanders’ pet dogs to be killed. US soldiers armed with M16 rifles failed to kill them all so the survivors were gassed while their owners looked on.

A tank-landing ship and five other ships arrived at Diego Garcia with at least 820 US soldiers. They set up a rock crusher and a cement block factory. Bulldozers ripped coconut trees from the ground. The coral reefs were blasted to provide rock for a runway. Diesel sludge polluted the pure blue waters of the ocean.

Chagossians who were away from the islands were told that they could not return as their homeland was now closed to them. Most Chagossians had never previously left the islands but were told that it was a criminal offence to stay without a permit. The British deliberately ran down supplies of food and medicine. Salvage crews dismantled the plantations so there was no work or home-grown food.

The remaining Chagossians were herded onto cargo ships and, after a horrendous voyage sleeping on decks awash with urine and vomit, were dumped in Mauritius and the Seychelles where they have had to live in tin shacks in the slums, suffering extreme poverty and alcoholism.

Some think the worse thing they have suffered is sagren, the melancholy of longing for a lost homeland.

The Chagossians’ efforts to plead their case in the English courts have sometimes been successful. However, a great deal of legal to-ing and fro-ing ended with the House of Lords, sitting as the highest court in the land, rejecting the islanders’ claims. In October 2008, the Law Lords refused Chagossian refugees in the UK the right to return home. As Lord Hoffmann expressed it: "The right of abode is a creature of the law."

Dr Sean Carey, Research Fellow at Roehampton University, who has written extensively about this subject, wrote an open letter to David Miliband in the New Statesman, in which he said: "Perhaps Barack Obama’s inauguration as US President in January will provide an opportunity to change current policy towards the Chagos islanders." See how that worked out! The journeys of a Gulfstream aircraft, registered N379P, are disclosed in a list of more than 3,000 flight logs obtained by Stephen Grey, an investigative journalist and author of Ghost Plane. The same aircraft flew from Washington via Athens to Diego Garcia, the logs show. Though there have been persistent reports in the US that detainees have been secretly held in Diego Garcia, the British government has always dismissed the claims. Diego Garcia was used to launch bombing missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan and some fear it could be used to attack Iran.

Pete Bouquet of Rainbow Warrior described what the base looks like: "The Diego Garcia base is alien and horrible. The quisling-like British complicity in it, from the red telephone kiosk in the airport arrival area, to the fact that UK personnel have to cadge flights off the Americans, is shameful and degrading. The Chagossians should be allowed to return and the base should be closed."

More recent dirty dealings in relation to a Marine Protected Area were revealed by WikiLeaks

http://www.amaliaking.co.uk/articles/annotated-wikileaks-diplomatic-cable-chagos-island-diego-garcia-marine-protected-area.pdf

William Hague and Nick Clegg soon ditched their pre-election commitment to change the former Labour government’s shameful policy

The 1966 Anglo-American Agreement for the US military base on Diego Garcia comes up for renewal in 2016

The Chagos islands: the British government's recipe for dehumanisation

By Rosemary Ekosso

www.ekosso.com
July 11, 2007

Ingredients
Warmongering
An innate sense of racial superiority
Landgrabbing
A god complex.

Method
Start in 17th and 18th century
First, uproot people from their homeland
Enslave them or otherwise press them into demeaning service
Then ignore them until a rich and powerful country wants their land
Next, turn your beady eye on this land, viewing the human inhabitants as an inconvenient weed on potentially lucrative real estate
Weed the natives out, referring to them as "Tarzan and Man Friday", thus playing up racist stereotypes of savages who should be divested of their land because you are better at exploiting it.
Then lease the island to the rich and powerful nation in exchange for an 11 million pound discount on Polaris missiles.
Then lie about it all.

These are the bare bones. Now, let's flesh it out.

I have often felt that the legendary British stiff upper lip, at least insofar as the dealings of many British governments with their colonies are concerned, is kept so by a determination to prevent the truth, or an acknowledgement of the fundamental immorality of their situation, from ever coming out. But thank God for the Internet.

It all started with the cold war, that interesting non-conflict of elephants whose victims were the field mice who had no interest in the conflict.

No, actually, it did not. It started with the slave trade and colonialism and using human beings as farm animals.

Let us traipse lightly across the decades, though, because we all have at least a general idea of what happened during that time.

The US wanted a military base, and the Brits had islands to lease. The US cast its covetous eyes on Aldabra Island, near Madagascar. But there was a hitch. The island was the breeding ground for rare giant tortoises. We all know how het-up conservationists can get when animal habitats are threatened. The powers did not want het-up conservationists making heated pronouncements about tortoises. People are much more likely to take note if a moth, a tortoise or a fruit bat is in danger. They are less likely to worry about the eviction of a few blacks, especially if public opinion is shaped to view them as a few savages recently settled on prime land.

So the Chagos Islands were chosen. There was a further administrative matter to deal with. Prior to granting independence to Mauritius (although one wonders how independent that country can be if one observes that it was one of the few to come out in support of Paul Wolfowitz), it was important to sever the Chagos islands from that nation so that it would be easier to draw and quarter it. Former colonies will remember the nation-wrecking proclivities of British governments.

Anyway, snip, snip, snip went the British government, like Caligula with garden shears. Snip snip. So much of British colonialism reminds one of a Roman emperor gone mad.

Thus, between 1967 and 1973, 2000 islanders were moved to Mauritius, where they now live, except for a hundred or so settled near Crawley in England. The islanders got British citizenship, a development viewed by some as better than going to the Christian heaven. This measure that gave them citizenship, the Immigration Ordinance of 1971, gave the Brits the legal backing to allow the US to build its bases on Diego Garcia, the biggest of the Chagos islands.

The US used their military base for warmongering, as expected. They used it in Gulf War I, Afghanistan, and Gulf War II. Fancy dispossessing people so their land can be used as a springboard for killing more people!

The islanders bless them, have not sat and moaned. They have fought the British government in British courts.

The British government, as most former colonies will tell you, can be a formidable adversary.

One of its initial salvoes was to make an order using the Royal Prerogative. This basically means that you can make an order on behalf of the sovereign without necessarily telling him/her about what it entails. This sounds very dangerous, and it is. It reminds us of the sort of things "banana republics" do. But a judge who dealt with the case said the minister who invoked the royal prerogative had misused power in doing so because:

Indeed, the Crown may be doing something that - if she only knew the true position - she would prefer not to do, and yet it is then said that the Government can hide behind the Crown's prerogative

Time passed. In 2000, the British government first lost its case in the High Court. The government then said that a feasibility study needed to be conducted prior to allowing the islands to return. What kind of feasibility study do you need to return to people land that you stole from them?

American authorities, however, expressed the concern that if Diego Garcia were returned to its owners, their security would be in danger (no paranoia there!). So the British government, once more preferring the friendship of the most powerful to the human rights of the less so, did an about turn and marched smartly backwards to its previous position. The island was not to be returned. People could not live on Diego Garcia.

But in May this year, the High Court decided that it was "repugnant" to exile people like that.

So now the Chagossians can go back. Says a euphoric article in the l'Express of Port Louis:

"This victory of the Chagossians is the proof that everything is not only a matter of power. The little Chagossians did not hesitate to challenge a big power as Great Britain because they felt they were victims of an injustice and they were indeed right to do so."

However, as the writer of the article admits, "Britain will fight tooth and nail to keep the Chagos archipelago." We saw that with the Falklands/ las Malvinas, depending on whose side you're on.

The writer in L'Express thinks that it bodes well for small peoples struggling against strong and soulless governments.

I agree. Many of us have become cynical about our ability to influence things that may cause us harm and even death. People feel that governments are uncontrollable and are too lethargic or terrified to even attempt the task. Shall we then give up and let them mess us about? Shall we accept our imposed role as pawns in the games of nations and power blocs?

No. Ants are tiny things, but anyone who has ever been foolish enough to attack a column of driver (or "soldier") ants knows that when acting in concert, small animals can be very dangerous.

Besides, silence is consent.

Reprinted with consent of the author from:
www.ekosso.com/2007/07/the-chagos-isla.html