Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (32 page)

Outside the court, Olivier said, “We always believed in our struggle. We always believed that what was done to us was unlawful. It is not possible to banish our rights. . . . We will go back to our native land. It is now very clear that we have the right to do so.”
³⁶

To the disappointment of Olivier and others, the government appealed the decision again, forcing the islanders to head back once more to the Court of Appeal. A year later, on May 23, 2007, the Court handed the people its third victory. The decision called the 2004 Orders in Council nothing less than an “abuse of power.”
³⁷

Figure 11.2 Aurélie Talate addresses a Chagos Refugees Group general assembly with Olivier Bancoult in foreground, Mauritius, 2004. Photo by author.

“It has been held,” said CRG lawyer Richard Gifford, “that the ties that bind a people to its homeland are so fundamental that no Executive Order can lawfully abrogate those rights.” Hoping that this third victory would put an end to the litigation, Gifford and the CRG called on the government to start negotiations to return the “loyal British subjects to their homeland.”
³⁸

After several months’ delay and to the people’s disappointment, British officials decided to issue their final appeal. The government would bring the case before the Law Lords of the House of Lords, the highest court in the United Kingdom. There would be a final legal showdown over the islanders’ right to return. Again, though, the people would have to wait, this time more than a year before a June 2008 hearing.
*

To now, both governments remain adamantly opposed to any return. U.K. officials claim that resettlement would be too expensive, citing a £5 million initial investment and £3–5 million contributed on a yearly basis until the islands reach self-sufficiency.
³⁹
Some observers have speculated that officials are using every legal and logistical hurdle to drag the case out as long as possible. “There must be hope in London,” one journalist writes, “that as more and more of the original 2000 inhabitants of the Chagos Islands grow old and die . . . the Chagossians’ campaign to return to their homeland will lose momentum. By and large, elderly people don’t make good campaigners and dead ones don’t campaign at all.”
⁴⁰

U.S. officials say they are opposed to a return on security grounds. “The use of the facilities on Diego Garcia in major military operations since September 11, 2001, has reinforced the United States’ interest in maintaining secure long-term access to them,” wrote Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Lincoln P. Bloomfield in a letter sent to British officials. “We believe that an attempt to resettle any of the islands on the Chagos Archipelago would severely compromise Diego Garcia’s unparalleled security and have a deleterious impact on our military operations, and we appreciate the steps taken by Her Majesty’s Government to prevent such resettlement.”
⁴¹

Even putting aside for a moment the CRG’s position that nothing can override a people’s right to its homeland, the scores of yachts anchoring at any given time in the archipelago as well as the hundreds of non-U.S. service workers on Diego Garcia would seem to make a mockery of such arguments.
⁴²

Responding to British officials’ claims that the costs of resettlement are too high, the CRG has observed that the British Government collects sizable fees for commercial licenses to fish the waters of the BIOT and spends tens of millions of pounds annually on its other remaining colonies. “The British Government has the ability to rebuild—to put in place all the infrastructure, to work for the welfare of the Chagossian community,” Olivier
told me. “But we ask, where are the rights of the Chagossians?” Pointing to both governments, he said, “The money that they spend to buy arms, to destroy humanity—is it too expensive to resettle the Chagossians in our natal land?”

U.S. officials have calculated since the 1960s that there would be few if any costs of ignoring the Chagossians’ welfare as long as British officials assumed the responsibility to deal with the political and economic ramifications of the removals. And to this point, U.S. officials have largely been correct: The U.S. Government has faced few political or economic costs as a result of ignoring the Chagossians’ plight, while enjoying all the benefits of the base.

Equally, given the significance of the base to the U.S. military, the prospect that the United States, under pressure from the Chagossians or the international community, would voluntarily leave the island or that the United Kingdom would evict its closest ally appears dim in the short term. On the other hand, the Chagossians’ multiple recent court victories, the 2006 visit to Chagos granted by both governments, and growing media attention focused on the case signal new momentum that might result in longer-term impacts on the U.S. and U.K. governments. With the islanders headed to the highest court in the United Kingdom, successive judicial rebukes are increasing pressure on British officials not only to allow the Chagossians’ return but to finance some kind of rehabilitation of the islands, possibly as part of a wider reparations package.
⁴³

With the islanders’ movement inflicting increasing costs and embarrassment on both nations, it is hard to know how the two governments will react. If Chagossians were to return even in small numbers to some of Chagos’s outer islands, the financial and political costs of maintaining the BIOT as a militarized territory would increase. The presence of a non–selfgoverning population in Chagos should force the UN to give renewed attention to the islanders and the conditions under which the BIOT was created. With awareness of the case growing in the United States, pressure is already mounting on the U.S. Government to accept responsibility for the people, to assist with resettlement and compensation, and to allow them to work on the base.

“The great powers, they who control the world, they who make so many noble declarations” about human rights, they must “correct this error that they made with the Chagossian community,” Olivier told me, his voice rising, the palm of his hand slapping against his thigh. “[We] were a people that was living in prosperity. A people that was living in a state of wellbeing.
A people that had its own culture and that had its own traditions. A people that had a full life like everyone else.”

The initial U.S.-U.K. agreement for Diego Garcia ends in 2016. Exercising an optional twenty-year extension written into the agreement once appeared automatic. Now growing momentum for the Chagossians coupled with the failure of the Anglo-American military project in the Middle East leaves the future for both the islanders and the “Footprint of Freedom” very much in the balance.

For now let us ponder the image of Rita Bancoult’s son Olivier standing at a podium in Geneva, addressing a forum of the United Nations, speaking to a gathering of hundreds of indigenous groups from around the world: “How can a small people like us dare challenge the UK and the United States?” he asks. “It seems an impossible conflict to resolve, but we stand by our convictions that justice will prevail.”
⁴⁴

*
This book was completed several months before the court date. See
http://www.chagossupport.org.uk
for updates.

THE RIGHT TO RETURN AND A HUMANPOLITIK

While to now the Chagossians have been almost entirely forgotten in the United States, the responsibility of the United States for the people’s fate is clear: Although the British Government and its agents performed most of the physical work involved in displacing the Chagossians, the U.S. Government ordered, orchestrated, and financed the expulsion. First, the U.S. Government developed and advanced the original idea for a base on Diego Garcia as part of the Strategic Island Concept. Next, U.S. officials solicited and then colluded with the British Government as its partner. In the process, the U.S. Government insisted on the removal of the Chagossians, a condition to which the British Government readily agreed. Subsequently, the United States secretly paid the British for the expulsion, for the silence of Mauritius and the Seychelles, and for other costs of establishing the BIOT as a military colony. Along the way, the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations circumvented congressional oversight of military appropriations and base creation, censored media coverage of base plans, and took other steps to conceal the expulsion and the creation of the base from the U.S. public and the world.

After finally receiving a congressional appropriation for the base, the U.S. Government ordered the British Government to complete the removal of the islanders, refusing requests from the U.S. Embassy in London and British officials to allow the people to remain on Diego Garcia as base employees. U.S. officials then monitored the progress of the deportation process, ignoring warnings about the absence of a resettlement plan, as U.S. Seabees assisted in the last deportations on Diego Garcia and the extermination of Chagossians’ pet dogs. Finally, since the expulsion, the U.S. Government has continually denied all responsibility for the islanders and their welfare and barred them from working as civilian employees on the
base. In exile, most Chagossians quickly found themselves impoverished. Most to this day have remained impoverished as marginal outsiders in Mauritius and the Seychelles.

Given these facts, we must now step back to consider what we can learn from Diego Garcia and what we must do about it.

RACE AND RACISM

First and foremost, we cannot mince words. The expulsion was an act of racism. Because Chagossians were considered “black,” because Chagossians were small in number and lacked any political or economic clout, they were an easy target for removal. Because they were considered black, planners could easily regard them as insignificant, as a “nitty gritty” detail. Planners could think of them (in the moments that officials gave them any thought), as the CIA once put it, as “NEGL”—NEGLIGIBLE.
¹

“The fact is that nobody cared very much about these populations,” said former Defense Department official Gary Sick, who testified to Congress about the removals in 1975. “It was more of a nineteenth-century decision—thought process—than a twentieth-or twenty-first-century thought process. And I think that was the bind they got caught in. That this was sort of colonial thinking after the fact, about what you could do.” And U.S. officials, Sick said, “were pleased to let the British do their dirty work for them.”

In this way, the Chagossians’ expulsion and the pattern of forcibly displacing numerically small, non-“white,” non-European colonized peoples to build bases resembles many forms of violence that tend to afflict the poor, the dark, and the powerless, those who so often get treated as “rubbish people.” Anthropologists Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois explain:

The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Eriksen referred to “pseudo-speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human.
²

Mark Curtis has called the Chagossians “unpeople.”
³

Ultimately, however, race and racism played a different role in the displacement of the islanders and other victims of base displacement than
in older forms of empire. Whereas race and racism were the explicit ideologies of European imperialism,
⁴
in more recent history, race and racism have played a prominent role in structuring the vulnerability of those who will be displaced, while serving as a more subtle, internal ideological influence allowing officials to “assume the license” to displace the racialized.
⁵

The Chagossian case illustrates this shift: As a people, the islanders have been displaced twice—once as enslaved people and indentured laborers taken to work on Chagos by the British and French empires and once expelled from Chagos at the behest of the U.S. Empire. The result in both cases has been the profound disruption and impoverishment of their lives. Though racism played different roles in the two displacements, both are examples of how, in different ways, as anthropologist Leith Mullings says, “racism works through modes of dispossession,” turning “perceived differences, generally regarded as indelible and unchangeable, into inequality.”
⁶

At another level, U.S. officials displaced the Chagossians and similar groups because military officials prefer not to be bothered by local populations, and because a group of powerful officials had the power to make it so—among them, Barber, Rivero, Burke, Komer, Nitze, Moorer, and Zumwalt, as well as the Navy itself, pushing the base plan over fifteen years. As sociologist Frances Fox Piven put it to me simply one day, U.S. officials displaced the Chagossians “because they could.” “Across history,” writes Mark Gillem, “the hands of empire predictably travel past the same markers: displacements and demolitions are the norm.”
⁷