This is a transcript from PM. The program is broadcast around Australia at 5:10pm on Radio National and 6:10pm on ABC Local Radio.
Reporter: Mark Colvin
MARK COLVIN: It's one of the forgotten tragedies of the last half century - the story of the people of Diego Garcia, the island atoll in the Indian Ocean which nowadays serves as a base for the US military.
The United States paid the British Government $14-million in 1966 for the use of Diego Garcia but along with the deal came an agreement that the people who actually lived there, known as the Chagossians, would be kicked out. So the Chagossians have been in exile ever since, despite a British High Court decision in 2000 giving them the right to return.
Meanwhile sources including the UN rapporteur on torture have claimed that the US has used Diego Garcia not only as a military base but also as a so-called "black site" - a secret prison for holding suspected enemy combatants.
The whole story is told in a new book, "Island of Shame", by American anthropologist David Vine.
DAVID VINE: Diego Garcia was one of what looks like to be now more than two-dozen CIA black sites, secret prisons where the United States under the direction of Dick Cheney and President Bush had detained suspected terrorists. And more broadly, Diego Garcia has been a little known, especially in this country probably less in Australia I imagine, launch pad for the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
MARK COLVIN: I think not necessarily better known in Australia. Tell us more about the history.
DAVID VINE: The history goes back to the late 1950s when officials in the US Pentagon and especially in the US Navy began looking for island bases around the world where they might acquire islands and build bases that would be strategically located so that the US could, their words, intervene militarily in future conflicts. And very quickly the island of Diego Garcia became the prime candidate for the acquisition by the United States with the help of the British Government and the creation of a base.
MARK COLVIN: What's the geographical significance of Diego Garcia?
DAVID VINE: Officials in the navy and elsewhere in the US national security bureaucracy saw that Diego Garcia, while far from any land mass, was ideally located in their eyes in its proximity to the Persian Gulf and the Middle East and then areas of the world from southern Africa all the way through South Asia and South-East Asia. They saw it is a prime location from which they could quickly insert US military power far more quickly than sending air force or army or marine power from the United States itself.
MARK COLVIN: All of which would be one thing if the islands had been uninhabited but they weren't.
DAVID VINE: That's right; that's right. And which US officials and British officials were well aware of. But from the beginning the plan was to simply get rid of the local population. US officials in particular and British officials hoped and thought that given the small size of the population, about 1500 to 2,000 at the time, they could deport them and no-one would more or less object.
MARK COLVIN: Where did they put them?
DAVID VINE: They deported them in a process that lapsed or spanned 1968 to 1973 in the Western Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles.
MARK COLVIN: And one justification for that was that allegedly they had probably come from there in the first place. They were migrant workers or descendents of migrant workers.
DAVID VINE: Allegedly is the key word there. US and British officials crafted what was a public relations plan in the late 1960s and early 1970s to represent the Chagossians, as the Indigenous people are known, to the world as migrant labourers or transient workers, rather than the Indigenous people that they are, having lived in the islands for five generations or more, going back to the time of the American Revolution, so late 18th century.
They simply decided that they would, in the words of British officials, "maintain the fiction" that the Chagossians were transients and had no real connection to the islands.
MARK COLVIN: This is a very long story but many people think that it should have ended in the year 2000 when the British High Court ruled that the Chagossians could go back to Diego Garcia. Yet they're not back there yet, are they?
DAVID VINE: They're not. They're not. That was certainly the hope of many Chagossians after their really historic victory in 2000, in which the British High Court ruled their expulsion unlawful. The hope was, and initial indications from the British Government were that they would be able to return. Plans were underway to allow for a return and a reconstruction of their society.
Unfortunately a subsequent British Government appealed essentially and overturned the earlier ruling...
MARK COLVIN: So what was going on there do you think?
DAVID VINE: There are strong indications that there was pressure from the US Government to prevent any return, even to some of the outer islands in the Chagos Archipelago which are over 100 miles, 130 kilometres or so away from Diego Garcia; far, far away from any interference in military activity.
MARK COLVIN: And why is it so important to the United States?
DAVID VINE: It's important to US, at least some US Government officials because they see Diego Garcia along with Guam, a US colony or territory, as key overseas military installations through which they can exert US military power and maintain US dominance in the world, particularly in the case of Diego Garcia, over the Middle East and Persian Gulf and its oil supplies.
MARK COLVIN: Is there any way the Chagossians could go back while there was still a United States base there at all?
DAVID VINE: Absolutely. And the Chagossians are not calling for the removal of the base on the whole. Many of them want to work on the base where non-US and non-British citizens have been working on the base for about 20 years.
Less than half of Diego Garcia has actually been used by the base. The entire eastern portion of the island is free of military activities and people could live there. And people could certainly live on these outer islands, the other islands in the archipelago that were formally inhabited by the Chagossians.
But both the British and the US Governments have been very firm in their position that the Chagossians can't go back to any of the islands.
MARK COLVIN: Do you see that changing for instance with the Obama administration?
DAVID VINE: I certainly hope so and the Chagossians are very hopeful that the Obama administration will hear their claim to return much more favourably than previous administrations and finally accept the responsibility that the US Government bears for the expulsion and the suffering the Chagossians have experienced in exile.
MARK COLVIN: American anthropologist David Vine who worked with the Chagossians on their case and whose new book is called "Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia".
No comments:
Post a Comment