Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (23 page)

The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted

7.2 U.S. Government officials. Top from left: Adm. Arleigh Burke, Adm. Horacio Rivero, Paul Nitze. Bottom from left: Robert McNamara, Adm. Thomas Moorer, Adm. Elmo Zumwalt. Photos credits: Admirals courtesy Naval Historical Center; Nitze courtesy Harry S. Truman Library and Museum; McNamara courtesy Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum.

When the House Special Subcommittee on Investigations called for a day of hearings, administration representatives held firm. On November 4, 1975, Democrat subcommittee chair Lee H. Hamilton
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asked State Department representative George T. Churchill if he considered the characterization “‘all went willingly’ to be a fair disclosure of the facts.”

“In the sense that no coercion at all was used,” Churchill replied.

“No coercion was used when you cut off their jobs? What other coercion do you need? Are you talking about putting them on the rack?”
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Figure 7.3 “Aunt Rita,” wearing her best for a Chagos Refugees Group festival and fundraising event, 2004. Photo by author.

At another point in the hearings Hamilton probed further with Churchill: “Is it the position of our Government now, that we have no responsibility toward these islanders? Is that our position?”

“We have no legal responsibility,” Churchill replied. “We are concerned. We recently discussed the matter with the British. The British have discussed it with the Mauritian Government. We have expressed our concern.”

“It is our basic position that it is up to the British. Is that it?” Hamilton pressed.

“It is our basic position that these people originally were a British responsibility and are now a Mauritian responsibility,” Churchill explained.

“We have no responsibility, legal or moral?”

“We have no legal responsibility. Moral responsibility is a term, sir, that I find difficult to assess.”
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Before testimony’s end, Churchill said that it was the position of the Government not to allow the Chagossians to return to their homeland. Congress has never again taken up the issue.

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Hamilton co-chaired the Iraq Study Group following the 2003 invasion.

DERASINE
: THE IMPOVERISHMENT
OF EXPULSION

Paradise Found: Twenty degrees south of the Equator, Mauritius lies at the crossroads of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Celebrated as the pearl of the Indian Ocean, it is truly a land of splendour and human warmth.

—Anahita World Class Sanctuary Mauritius
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If heaven is that painless place where pleasures never pall then Mauritian hideaways provide a close approximation.

—Condé Nast Traveler
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When you arrive in Cassis, you find a maze of rusting corrugated iron fences lining small passageways, dirt paths, and a few paved roads, surrounded by houses and shacks cobbled together in metal, concrete block, and wood. Four major cemeteries dominate the landscape of the slum neighborhood closest to the center of Port Louis. Trash often sits smoldering in empty garbage-strewn lots. Bent, rusted, and torn sheets of metal lie in piles that to an outsider seem like just more detritus but upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be emergency supplies for future home repairs. From the balconies of the few two or three story homes (in a neighborhood where the only upward mobility is usually literal), you see a tightly packed clutter of corrugated rooftops, many weighted down against Indian Ocean winds by bedsprings, broken-down bicycle parts, bricks. The rare palm tree juts up from below. An open drainage sewer
runs through the middle of the neighborhood, past one of the cemeteries and toward the ocean.

Although Mauritius is known internationally for its beautiful beaches, and although most of Cassis is surrounded by the Indian Ocean, there is little water and beach access in the neighborhood: Between a power station on one side and a sand plant on the other, a small stretch of beach remains. A landing area for fisherfolk lies nearby, small wooden boats dotting the water at anchor just off the shore. Up from the water are about ten yards of beach, across which are scattered pieces of coral, broken shells, and decaying fly-ridden seaweed, along with a collection of shattered bottles, rusted-out cans, abandoned tires, lone shoes, shards of wood, plastic bags, car parts, and shards of splintering white styrofoam. At the end of the beach is a mountain of sand out of which emanate a sulfurous stench and nine large black industrial pipes stretching out over the ocean. A large red and white government sign stands nearby, the bottom half of its message all that hasn’t been stripped away: “
BAIGNADE NON RECOMMANDEE
.” SWIMMING NOT RECOMMENDED.

Cassis is the neighborhood where Rita and Julien Bancoult found themselves and their family following Noellie’s death. After briefly sharing a home with Rita’s mother and a group totaling seventeen, Rita and Julien found a little shack for the family. When the owner demanded Rs1,500 for the property—a price they couldn’t come close to paying—they found themselves evicted.

For fifteen days they lived in another shack next to Cassis’s St. George’s cemetery. Then the owner told them that his son was getting married and needed the home. Out on the streets again, the family found a small plot of land, across the street from the cemetery, along with some sheets of metal and some wood. Paying the land’s owner a yearly rent, they built a small three-room shack. “Inside there, I—we lived.” That’s where “we went through all our
mizer
,” Rita said, using the Mauritian and Chagos Kreol word for not just poverty, but abject, miserable poverty.

Julien eventually found some on-again, off-again work as a casual laborer loading and unloading trucks late into the night around Port Louis. When the trucks needed laborers, Julien brought home some cash. When the trucks had plenty of men, Rita explained, he came home empty-handed. She went to work doing washing and ironing in a wealthy woman’s house. But she had to be careful. “If a person went and said that I’m Ilois, the next day I go” to work “the madame pays me and tells me, ‘Go! Don’t come back to work.’ Like we’re inferior, you understand?”

Sometimes though, the woman she worked for was nice and would give her some curry and some bread. “I didn’t eat it,” she said. “I put it in my bag. I brought it home for my children. How will I eat it, David, when my children have nothing to eat? I didn’t eat. I put it in my bag.”

In those days, feeding the children was a daily struggle. “Then, David, I tell you, I had a difficult life, I did. At times the children didn’t eat, didn’t eat. I was worried. I didn’t know what I would do.”

At times, Rita waited for people to throw bags of stale bread in the trash. “I’m not afraid to say it. I only looked out to see if people were watching me. I just took the bag,” got the bread, and went back home. With some wood for kindling, she would light a fire, warm the bread on top of a small shard of metal, and make a tea-like infusion with wild leaves and some sugar. “My children ate that and the bread,” she said.

Other days she would make a thin watery broth with
bred murum
—another wild edible leaf known as the “food of the poor.”

“I took the bred murum. I picked the leaves. I didn’t have oil. I only had salt with a little bit of ginger. I grated the ginger. I put it in the boiling water. I put the leaves in. I added salt. The children wetted the bread that I had warmed, and they ate it.

“But on my island, I was never like that, David. How will I forget? My children went two days without eating.”

Rita’s story is typical of islanders who were barred from returning to Chagos beginning in 1968. They found themselves homeless and jobless in a foreign land, separated from their islands, their communities (both those living and those buried on the islands), and their entire way of life.

After the deportations began in 1971, Chagossians were literally left on the docks of Port Louis. “The Ilois walked bewildered off their ships and tramped through the slums of the capital,” investigative journalist John Madeley recounts, “to try to find a relative or friend who would offer accommodation.”
³

Another reporter saw how many had “to go begging to survive, and live in shacks which are little more than chicken coops.”
⁴
More than half lived in single-room houses with as many as nine people in a room. In one case in Cassis, seven Chagossian families moved into a single courtyard that already housed ten other families. They shared one water tap, one toilet, and one shower among them.
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Already scattered over 1,200 miles between Mauritius and the Seychelles, Chagossians dispersed further around Port Louis and the main island in the Seychelles, Mahé. Although many in Mauritius settled around other Chagossians, most of the social networks and village ties that had previously
connected people were severely ruptured. Chagossians deported to the Seychelles were even more isolated, crowding into the homes of relatives or squatting on the land of others. Some families lived “
anba lakaz
,” or underneath another family’s stilt-elevated house. One family lived in a vacant cowshed, slowly transforming it into a formal house over many years.

Figure 8.1 Rita David in her home with box used to take personal belongings from Peros Banhos during deportation to Mauritius, 1972. Photo by author.

In Mauritius, Chagossians found themselves on an overcrowded island that population experts were warning might soon become a “catastrophe” given one of the fastest growing populations in the world.
⁶
Novelist V.S.
Naipaul called the island the “overcrowded barracoon.”
⁷
Conditions in Port Louis were particularly bad, according to British experts:

The housing conditions in parts of Port Louis are worse than anything we saw in the villages [in rural Mauritius]. Hundreds of people are crowded into tin shacks hardly fit for animals. Not surprisingly, Tuberculosis and other diseases are very common in these slums, and a large proportion of the families depend on the help, regular and irregular, of the Public Assistance Department. Urban rents are relatively high and there is a serious shortage of housing in the towns; a situation made worse by the cyclone damage in 1960.
⁸

Although by most accounts health in Chagos was “if anything somewhat better than in Mauritius,”
⁹
soon after their arrival, many Chagossians began to fall ill and die. A survey conducted by a support group documented “an impressive number of cases where Ilois have found death after having landed in Mauritius,
i.e.
from one to 12 months’ stay.” The dead totalled at least 44 by 1975 “because of unhappiness, poverty and lack of medical care.”
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Among them were:

Bertin Cassambeu: Dead through illness, distress.

Eliezer Louis: Had gone to Rogers [shipping company] so as to return to Diego. When he failed, had much grief and died.

Ito Mandarin: Died after landing of grief and poverty.

Victorrien, Michel, Vivil, and Sabine Rabrune: Had no property. Were abandoned by everybody. Died in disgrace.

Willy Thomas: Died in poverty and of grief.

Daisy Volfrin: No food for three days, obtained Rs3 and no more as Public assistance. Died through poverty.
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