The Chagossians are continuing their fight after being cheated of their birthright.
The British Government’s decision before the summer to fight the exiled Chagos Islanders – the former inhabitants of Diego Garcia and the surrounding archipelago – in the European Court of Human Rights shows once more that racism and colonialism are alive and well in the hearts of Foreign and Commonwealth Office bureaucrats.
Dismissing the European Court’s suggestion of a “friendly settlement” with this uniquely exiled population of British citizens, the FCO has denied any wrongdoing and even claimed that the islanders have no human rights at all. The hypocrisy is evident in the concurrent insistence that: “We do not defend the morality of what was done in the 1960s and 1970s”. Yet they are turning the screw on the same policy of victimising poor, black and marginalised people who have been robbed of their homeland.
The FCO claims are so false that they border on lies. They are deployed to mislead the European Court. For example, the claim is that it was not really the British who expelled the islanders from their own country, but the plantation company. That firm was acting as the agent of the United Kingdom. The claim is that the islanders really wanted to leave. The fact is that they were duped into signing forms (without translation or explanation) renouncing their rights.
David Vine’s book, Island of Shame, published by Princeton University Press, sets the record straight on this revisionist version of history and explains the duplicity, bribery and concealment with which the project was conceived in Washington, accepted by Harold Wilson’s Government in hock to the United States and perpetuated by subsequent administrations on both sides of the Atlantic. This was done in full knowledge of the fact that the rights of the islanders – who had been there since the plantations started in the 1780s using former slaves – were being denied.
This shameful chapter in imperial history involves the arbitrary and cruel removal of the Chagos Islanders in the early 1970s in exchange for a secret payment of $14 million from the Pentagon. This enabled the United States to develop Diego Garcia as a base to aid in its domination of the third of the globe centred on the Indian Ocean.
The islanders saw none of this money. They were forced to abandon their homes, watch their dogs being killed and then were dragooned onto overcrowded ships to be dumped on the docks in Mauritius and the Seychelles.
They had children to feed but no money and no homes. Some of them – perhaps the stronger– were reduced to theft and prostitution and ended up in prison. The Chagos Islanders have a higher proportion of people in prison than America’s one in every 100 of its citizens. Weaker Chagossians became victims of the slow death caused by drugs and alcohol. A few took the short cut of suicide. One mother in despair doused herself in petrol before burning herself to death. She left five young children.
Today, two generations later, the Chagossians are still fighting for justice and the right to return to their islands. They’ve lost some court cases and won others. Crucially, the Law Lords ruled against them in 2008. Now they await the final judgement of the European Court of Human Rights.
Why was all this allowed to happen? In the 1960s, Washington’s view was that the threat posed by international communism was real and growing. Meanwhile, the empires of European countries were disintegrating as their component parts sought and achieved independence. After independence, these new nations either tended towards the left or – at best, as far as the US was concerned – were unhelpfully neutral. For the White House, American security was no longer coupled with the possession of territory. Security was a function of access to economic markets and a guaranteed supply of the sinews of power – oil and other raw materials – without which American factories would grind to a halt. The answer was the “Strategic Island Concept” – a global network of frontier forts to envelope the world under a US military umbrella that threatened enemies and protected friends.
In 1894, the US helped to overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy in the interests of white settlers and got Pearl Harbour even before annexing the territory in 1898. When Japanese dreams of empire were threatened with strangulation by America’s financial siege that could have bankrupted the country, the US won Okinawa and Guam in the resulting conflict. The only missing piece of the jigsaw was the Indian Ocean.
Diego Garcia and its coral reefs fitted the bill perfectly: isolated, the property of a pliant ally and with a seemingly negligible population. There were a few hitches and delays in Washington. Not everyone recognised the need to project US forces even further, particularly with American troops already bogged down in a war they couldn’t win in Vietnam But finally it was all systems go.
Plans for Diego Garcia included a nightclub, a movie theatre and a gym. It was just necessary to clear the islands of their indigenous residents. Britain bribed and coerced Mauritius into ceding the islands before independence. This country did the US’s dirty work.
The means were redolent of racism in its basest form. In misleading the United Nations Decolonisation Committee eight days after the detachment of Chagos to form a new and fake colony to present to the US, Britain’s man at the UN, one FDW Brown, stated that there were only 1,500 “labourers” who, following “consultation”, would be “resettled”.
In fact, the population was permanent and descended from the original inhabitants 200 years before and so qualified for self-determination under the UN Charter. Brown lied to make his case to the only international body with the power to prevent forced relocation. There had been no consultation with the islanders. There was no resettlement scheme of any kind to help with their deportation to foreign countries, Mauritius and the Seychelles. They weren’t even given the right to be in the Seychelles and had to find extortionate sums for work permits as Chagossian “foreigners”. Mauritius and the Seychelles did nothing to help them. They had been bribed to keep quiet.
Contrast the treatment of the Chagossians with the respect shown by Brown to the Falkland Islanders in that same speech to the UN committee. He said: “This is a small but prosperous community, enjoying a high standard of living, of people of great character and vitality. There is no ground whatever for suggesting that their wishes to this question of their own future should simply be set aside and yet that seems to the tenor of some of the speeches in this debate.
“It has been suggested that this population is somehow irrelevant and that it has no claim to have its wishes taken into account. Some surprising arguments have been advanced in support of this that the people are transient, that there are no births or deaths on the islands, that the people have been planted there by Britain rather than being of indigenous stock and that many of them are employed by the Falkland Islands Company”.
What Brown neglected to say was that the Falkland Islanders were white and the Chagossians were black.
The governor of Chagos, Sir Bruce Greatbach, was more overt in his description of the Chagossians: “It is important when dealing with the problem of the Ilois from Chagos to appreciate what type of people they are. They are extremely unsophisticated, illiterate, untrainable and unsuitable for any work other than the simplest labour tasks on a copra plantation. This is not altogether surprising, as they have spent all their lives on remote islands.”
This was the reasoning advanced to justify the removal of the Chagossian from their homeland. In the annals of colonial arrogance and ignorance, Sir Bruce figures large.
Yet it was all so unnecessary. The justification claimed was that clearance of the islands was needed for security reasons. However, in Okinawa the local population resides right up to the fences of the US bases where pre-emptive strikes were due to be launched against North Korea in 1994.
The nonsense and injustice of the situation is typified by the scores of yachts of the rich and famous anchored around Diego Garcia and by the hundreds of non-US workers from the Philippines and elsewhere who service the needs of American military personnel in the island’s nightclubs and bars.
One can only wonder what the Status of Forces Agreement between Britain and the US has to say about third country nationals on the islands and whose laws they have to obey on what is still a British colony and overseas territory of the European Union.
Unfortunately, to date, the European Commission has not been particularly helpful. We must hope that the European Parliament’s new development committee can do something to change this.
Meanwhile, as the British Foreign Office seeks to distance itself from the “morality” of history, the same disregard for human rights evident when a black and indigenous people were cheated out of their birthright can be seen with the permission given for this closed and secret British territory to be used for the “special rendition” of suspects by the CIA.
Glyn Ford is a former Labour MEP and Richard Gifford is the legal representative of the Chagos Refugees Group
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