Atoning for
Washington’s ‘Mass Kidnapping’ in the Indian Ocean
July 17, 2016
David Vine
Thursday, July 7, 2016
Foreign Policy in Focus
One week
after British voters decided to exit the European Union, the UK Supreme Court
was set to decide the fate of a small group of British citizens who had no such
vote when the UK and U.S. governments forced the people to exit their homeland
beginning in the late 1960s.
Known as
the Chagossians, these little known refugees have long been denied the kind of
democratic rights exercised in the Brexit referendum. Instead, Britain and the
United States forcibly removed the Chagossians from their homes during the
construction of the U.S. military base on the isolated Indian Ocean island of
Diego Garcia. Over nearly 50 years, the base has become a multi-billion-dollar
installation, playing key roles in the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Over the same period, the people have lived in impoverished exile, mostly on
the western Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles.
Before the
recent ruling, Chagossians waited anxiously to learn if they would be allowed
to return to their homeland.
An “Act of
Mass Kidnapping”
The history
of what the Washington Post’s editorial page called an “act of mass
kidnapping” dates to the time of U.S. independence. In the last decades of the
18th century, the ancestors of today’s Chagossians first arrived in Diego
Garcia and the rest of the Chagos Archipelago as enslaved and indentured
African and Indian laborers who worked on Franco-Mauritian coconut plantations.
Following emancipation and Britain’s seizure of the Chagos islands in 1814, a
new, indigenous society emerged.
Unfortunately
for the Chagossians, in 1958, U.S. Navy officials identified Diego Garcia as an
ideal location for a base. By 1965, high-ranking U.S. officials had convinced
the British government to detach the Chagos Archipelago from colonial Mauritius
(contravening UN decolonization rules) to establish the United Kingdom’s
last-created colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory.
During
secret negotiations, U.S. officials insisted the territory come under their
“exclusive control (without local inhabitants).” With the help of $14 million
quietly transferred without Congress’s or Parliament’s knowledge, British
officials agreed to take “administrative measures” to remove some 1,500 Chagossians.
Between
1968 and 1973, the two governments concealed the expulsion from the world. If
anyone asked, Anglo-American officials decided to “maintain the fiction that
the inhabitants of Chagos” were “transient contract workers,” as one bureaucrat
explained. A British official called the Chagossians “Tarzans” and “Man
Fridays,” in a tellingly racist reference to Robinson Crusoe.
Shortly
after construction began on Diego Garcia in 1971, U.S. Navy Admiral Elmo
Zumwalt issued the final, chilling deportation order in exactly three words:
“Absolutely must go.”
British
representatives forced Chagossians to board overcrowded cargo ships and
deported them 1,200 miles to Mauritius and the Seychelles. While the people
awaited deportation, British agents and U.S. Navy personnel rounded up and
killed the Chagossians’ pet dogs by gassing and burning them in sealed cargo
sheds.
In exile,
Chagossians received no resettlement assistance. A 1971 British ordinance
formally barred their return. By 1975,Washington Post reporter David Ottaway
found the exiles living in “abject poverty.”
Since the
expulsion, Chagossians have demanded the two governments let them return home.
After years of protests and hunger strikes, some won compensation payments from
Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s totaling around $6,000 per person.
Chagossians in the Seychelles received nothing.
In the
1980s, some Chagossians also realized they were UK citizens because of their
birth in a UK colony — a fact conveniently hidden by British officials. UK
citizenship has since enabled a long legal struggle, which landed Chagossians
in the Supreme Court this summer to hear if they might be able to go home.
In 2000,
the Chagossians briefly won the right of return when a lower court ruled their
expulsion unlawful. Lacking the money to resettle the islands immediately,
Chagossians were shocked when in 2004 the British government re-imposed the ban
on entering Chagos. The government did so by employing an archaic royal
prerogative to make laws for Britain’s colonies without parliamentary or local
approval. That is, in the name of the queen, the government asserted a colonial
right to make laws for the Chagossians without their consent.
When
Chagossians challenged the renewed ban, they won again in 2005 and, after an
appeal, in 2006. On the government’s final appeal, Britain’s highest court at
the time, the Law Lords, upheld the exile in a 3-2 decision.
The latest
suit asked the new British Supreme Court to reopen the 2008 case because of
what judges called British officials’ “regrettable” and “reprehensible” failure
to disclose relevant documents in the earlier litigation. In another 3-2
decision, however, the Court dismissed the Chagossians’ petition.
An Ongoing
Legal Battle
While the
dismissal and initial news coverage suggests a crushing defeat, the majority
opinion surprisingly supports Chagossians’ hopes for a return.
In his
ruling, Lord Jonathan Mance pointed to a 2015 British government-funded study
by consulting firm KPMG that found Chagossian resettlement on Diego Garcia and
elsewhere in Chagos feasible. “Logically the [resettlement] ban needs to be
revisited” given this finding, Mance wrote. Even further, he effectively
encouraged Chagossians to go back to court: If British officials refuse “to
support and/or permit resettlement,” Mance said, a Chagossian could challenge
such a decision “as irrational, unreasonable, and/or disproportionate.”
The
Chagossians’ “defeat” thus puts new pressure on both governments to allow a
return. If not, Britain will face years more of costly litigation. The United
States should be equally culpable, having dreamed up the base and paid for and
ordered the expulsion.
With
President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron facing their last
months in office, a two-year period to renegotiate the original 1966 base
agreement provides an opportunity to remedy the injustices Chagossians have
suffered and a stain on both our democracies. The Obama administration must
state publicly that the United States does not oppose resettlement. Cameron’s
government must restore the right of return. Both must assist with resettlement
efforts.
Costs would
be miniscule compared to the billions invested in the base. Critically, there
are no legitimate military grounds for preventing resettlement. Civilians live
next to U.S. bases worldwide from Germany to Guantánamo Bay. The Navy official,
Stuart Barber, who authored the original plan for Diego Garcia, admitted in a
1991 letter to Alaska Senator Ted Stevens that the expulsion “wasn’t necessary militarily.”
"We are
reclaiming our rights like every other human being,” Chagos Refugees Group
chair Olivier Bancoult told me in 2004. “I was born on that land…I have a right
to live on that land.”
Following
the Brexit vote and our Independence Day, British and U.S. citizens should
understand the importance of ensuring that all peoples enjoy the democratic
rights Chagossians have been denied for so long. Our two governments must heed
Chagossians’ simple demand to “let us return.”
David Vine is
an Associate Professor of Anthropology at American University and author
of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on
Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009). He’s conducted unpaid
research for the Chagossians since 2001.
Source URL: https://portside.org/2016-07-18/atoning-washington%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98mass-kidnapping%E2%80%99-indian-ocean
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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