from the Maritius Times
"Island of Shame" is an important and well-timed book on Diego Garcia. David Vine, assistant professor of anthropology at American University in Washington DC, has trawled through the archives in the US and the UK, talked to key military and administrative personnel and has also carried out fieldwork amongst the exiled Chagos Islanders in both Mauritius and the Seychelles between 2001 and 2008.
Vine begins his account by tracing human settlement in the Chagos Archipelago. The first slaves were brought to Diego Garcia in 1783 by French-born plantation owner, Pierre Marie Le Normand, who knew he was on to a good thing. The Archipelago, situated around 8° from the equator, was unaffected by the cyclones apt to wreak periodic havoc in more southerly islands like Mauritius, his adopted homeland, and thus provided a perfect environment for all year round copra production.
But French sovereignty was to be short lived after the British East India Company took "full and ample possession" of Diego Garcia and the other islands "in the name of our Most Gracious Sovereign George the third of Great Britain, France and Ireland…" in 1786. This relationship was formalised under the Treaty of Paris in 1814 when the Chagos Archipelago became an integral part of the British Colony of Mauritius.
By the beginning of the 20th century, the Archipelago was home to around 1000 people. On Diego Garcia alone there were six villages and several hospitals. And the islanders, the descendants of African slaves and a small number of South Indian indentured labourers, had evolved a culture significantly different in many ways from those to be found in Mauritius and the Seychelles.
Evidently life for the islanders involved a lot of hard work. They would toil from sunrise to sunset for six days a week but were provided by the local copra company with houses and small gardens for growing aubergines, squash and chillies as well as space for tending livestock. They could also avail themselves of a plentiful supply of fish, lobster and sea cucumbers from the lagoon too.
The decline of British military power in the Indian Ocean after the Second World War meant that the US saw dangerous consequences for its economic and political interests. Concerned about the presence of the Soviet Union and China in the region and anxious to protect oil supplies shipped from the Persian Gulf for itself and trading partners in Europe and the Far East, it actively sought out an island base in the region as it had done in Guam and Okinawa.
After some preliminary research in the Indian Ocean the largest and southernmost island in the Chagos group, Diego Garcia, came sharply into focus. It had already been used by the British as a base for flying boats and a communications centre in the Second World War and it had a deep water harbour for naval ships. Crucially, because of its length, a long runway for military aircraft could be readily constructed.
White House adviser Robert "Blowtorch Bob" Komer was excited about a joint US-British venture with America being the dominant partner. He spelled out the logic of the military and political situation in a memo to President John F Kennedy. "It is a simple fact that our greatest lack of conventional deterrent power lies along the broad arc from Suez to Singapore… we have traditionally left the defence of this region to the British, yet their strength is waning at a time when we face a potential show of force or actual combat ranging from Saudi Arabia to the Persian Gulf and Iran through India and Burma to Malaysia."
Jack Kennedy liked the idea and it seems that the UK Labour government led by Harold Wilson liked it even more. For the British a deal was a way of maintaining a presence in the Indian Ocean while transferring almost all of the economic costs to the US (which also provided a hefty discount on Polaris). There was, however, the problem of how to handle the two colonies, Mauritius and the Seychelles, which would lose out if a new British territory was created. The delegation negotiating Mauritian independence led by Dr Seewoosagur Ramgoolam (who would go on to become the country's first prime minister) was given little choice but to accept compensation of £3 million, while the Seychelles was given money for the construction of an international airport (which has underpinned its tourist sector ever since) .
The scene was set: an Order in Council issued by the British sovereign on 8 November, 1965 established a new entity on the world’s map, the British Indian Ocean Territory. A month later the UN General Assembly passed resolution 2066 expressing "deep concern" about the UK’s action. But this was far too late and an exchange of notes matter-of-factly entitled "Availability of Certain Indian Ocean Islands for Defense Purposes" completed the deal between Britain and the US on December 30, 1966.
Vine suggests that the US wanted the Chagos islands "swept" and "sanitised" so that its military personnel could operate without interference from the local population. However, this widely held theory has been recently questioned by David Snoxell, former British High Commissioner to Mauritius, 2000-2002, who argues (in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, March 2009) that although "…the US was looking for an uninhabited island to serve as a base, there is no available evidence that they insisted on the depopulation of all the islands. It was British officials, who were the instigators of this policy, albeit with American concurrence." This seems very plausible. But what we know for sure is that at least 1600 Chagos Islanders, redefined as "transient labourers" rather than inhabitants with rights and entitlements, were removed and dumped in Mauritius and the Seychelles by the British authorities between 1968 and 1973.
To illustrate the plight of the islanders forced into exile in Mauritius, Vine relies heavily on the testimony of Rita Bancoult, mother of the leader of the Chagos Refugees Group, Olivier Bancoult. It does not make comfortable reading. Apparently, when Mrs Bancoult was employed as a maid in Port Louis and given curry and bread for lunch by her employer, instead of eating it she would put it in her bag and take it home so that her children had some nourishment. On the days when no food was provided she was sometimes forced to retrieve stale bread from the rubbish tip and heat it up on a wood fire and brew a tea-like infusion made from wild leaves. Alas, on some days there was no food at all.
The contrast between life in the slums of Port Louis and Peros Banhos, where the Bancoults’ family dog had been taught to catch a fish from the lagoon and bring it to the house for the family supper, could not have been more marked. It is little wonder that so many of the Chagossians suffered from sagren, a deep sadness and despair, which they reckon has been the cause of so many premature deaths.
Vine rightly employs evidence from around the globe to indicate that the displacement of people for reasons, which might include anything from the construction of dams to volcanic eruptions without proper and adequate resettlement programmes results in some very predictable consequences, particularly if the receiving society is in poor shape. Indeed, at the time the Chagossians began to arrive in Mauritius the level of unemployment was high -- around 20% --while the vast majority of adult islanders were illiterate (schools had only opened on some of the islands in the Archipelago in the 1950s), making it extremely difficult for the newcomers to find work. Further, apart from their knowledge of fishing many of the skills such as marine carpentry and boat building that the Chagos Islanders possessed were of little use in Mauritius at the time. Some islanders fell back on the classic coping strategies of the marginalised and disadvantaged in any developing economy -- petty crime and prostitution to make a living and alcohol and drugs as a form of recreation.
In the Seychelles, it was a similar story. It took many years for the islanders to receive citizenship and they also experienced discrimination in terms of housing, jobs and education. "I've never felt comfortable here in the Seychelles," Vine was informed by Marie Ange Pauline who when she attended school kept her Chagos ancestry to herself for fear of reprisals from her fellow pupils. "We are treated as foreigners in Seychelles and in Seychelles they don't like foreigners."
All in all, the exile and subsequent treatment of the Chagos Islanders has been a wretched business with successive British and American administrations doing their level best to escape any substantive moral and financial responsibility.
A narrow majority verdict in the highest UK court, the House of Lords, last year has undoubtedly bought the British government some time. But it is clear that the issue of the Chagos islanders and Mauritius’ claim to sovereignty of the Archipelago are problems that are not going to go away without a just and honourable settlement. Over the last few months some serious questions have been asked in the House of Commons and House of Lords and the work of the Chagos All Party Parliamentary Group (co-ordinated by David Snoxell) continues. The case is also before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
While a settlement of the Chagos issue was clearly not possible while George W Bush was in the White House, things could change now that Barack Obama has been installed. The new US President has already made significant changes of direction in terms of policy in the Middle East not least in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (which he strongly reaffirmed in his meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, a few days ago), so it is entirely possible that the plight of the Chagos Islanders might find its way on to the agenda some time soon if it hasn't done so already.
And an intriguing indication of the way things might be heading was provided by former UK foreign secretary, Jack Straw, who when asked in a BBC interview last week about the validity of the Order in Council that he issued in 2004 banning the Chagossians from returning to their homeland instead of seeking the necessary authority before parliament, replied: "I think, with the benefit of hindsight, that what I exchanged was speed for legitimacy".
That's quite an admission from one of New Labour’s great survivors. Furthermore, Straw doesn’t have a track record of publicly criticising his previous policy decisions so something must be up. Could it be that the UK’s current Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice has detected a shift in the direction in which the political winds are blowing on both sides of the Atlantic and is manoeuvring to make sure that he ends up on the right side of the argument? The Chagos islanders and their descendants must certainly hope so.
Island of Shame: The Secret Military History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia by David Vine is published by Princeton University Press, £17.95.
Dr Sean Carey is Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism (CRONEM) at Roehampton University.
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