Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (34 page)

Viewed geographically, one sees how the small-scale acquisition of territory for island bases has allowed the United States, like empires before it, to dominate large swaths of
ocean territory
upon which global trade and economic expansion relies. Coupled with a powerful navy, an island base provides the force to effectively rule areas of ocean and transiting military or commercial traffic. In the Pacific, controlling bases from Okinawa and
Japan’s main islands to Guam and Pearl Harbor has allowed the U.S. Navy to make the ocean an “American lake.” Maintaining a base on Diego Garcia has helped the United States exert similar control in the Indian Ocean, particularly over oil traffic from the Persian Gulf. In the role that island bases and navies play in patrolling sea lanes and protecting oceangoing commerce, one sees a very direct way in which overseas bases undergird the economics of U.S. Empire.
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Bringing us back to Iraq and Afghanistan, the base helps show how these wars were not the aberrant actions of a single presidential administration but were instead, in important ways, the fulfillment of a strategic vision for controlling a large swath of Asia and, with it, the global economy, dating to at least World War II (and significantly advanced by Diego Garcia). As others have shown, the wars have significantly advanced the pursuit of U.S. control over Central Asian and Persian Gulf oil and natural gas supplies through the presence of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and private military contractors and the creation or expansion of bases in Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

DIEGO GARCIA AND THE CARTER DOCTRINE GO GLOBAL

The strategic logic of Diego Garcia, of using bases to control resource-rich regions, becomes even clearer when one considers reports that the United States has been exploring plans to develop a new base off the oil-rich west coast of Africa, in the Gulf of Guinea, on one of the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe. Currently, oil imports from the Gulf of Guinea account for 15 percent of the U.S. total. Many predict that the share will grow to 20 percent by 2010 and 25 percent by 2015. Continent-wide, the
Council on Foreign Relations
has suggested, “By the end of the decade sub-Saharan Africa is likely to become as important as a source of U.S. energy imports as the Middle East.”
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Indeed, this may have already come to pass. Looking at São Tomé, at least one U.S. official has described the proposed base as “another Diego Garcia.”
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The story sounds eerily familiar: In July 2002, the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. European Command visited the islands. The next month, then-President of São Tomé and Príncipe, Fradique de Menezes, told Portuguese television that he “received a call from the Pentagon to tell me that the issue [was] being studied.” He added, “It is not really a military base on our territory, but rather a support port for aircraft, warships,
and patrol ships.”
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Since 2002, several U.S. companies, including Exxon-Mobil and Noble Energy, have won oil exploration concessions in the Gulf of Guinea.
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At the end of 2006, the military built a radar installation on the islands. The following March, 200 U.S. marines conducted four days of military exercises. Months earlier, the U.S. military announced the creation of its first-ever “Africa Command” (AFRICOM) to oversee military operations on the continent. Elsewhere, U.S. officials are considering the creation of or have already established bases in Algeria, Djibouti, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda.
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Officials have repeatedly denied having any interest in a base on São Tomé.

IMPERIAL SHIFTS AND CONTINUITIES

The expansion of Diego Garcia into a major naval and air base fulfilled the hopes of many in the U.S. Navy and elsewhere in the national security bureaucracy, including Stu Barber, Horacio Rivero, Arleigh Burke, Robert Komer, Paul Nitze, and Elmo Zumwalt. So too the base was the realization of French lieutenant La Fontaine’s vision from two centuries earlier for having “a great number of vessels” at anchor in Diego Garcia’s lagoon.
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Viewed from this long-term perspective, Diego Garcia points to both shifts and continuities in the evolution of U.S. Empire and empire more broadly. On the one hand, Diego Garcia and the base network represent several longstanding imperial trends, including the persistence of traditional imperial tools of territorial acquisition and displacement, the development of modes of increasingly informal and indirect rule, and the continued use of a handful of remaining colonies and colonial relationships—Diego Garcia, Guam, Puerto Rico, Thule, Okinawa, South Korea among them—to exert dominance.
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This suggests that there is more continuity between the U.S. Empire and previous empires than has been acknowledged.

Diego Garcia and much of the U.S. global basing network are to some extent a return to an earlier form of imperialism when Britain and France were first interested in colonizing Diego Garcia and other islands in the Indian Ocean. In the eighteenth century, islands were initially valued for their military and not their economic value. Bases in Mauritius and Réunion hosted warships used to secure trade with India and later to subdue the subcontinent.

Three centuries later, weapons and supplies from Diego Garcia were among the first arriving in the Persian Gulf to link with U.S. soldiers preparing for war in Iraq. Once the war was underway, B-1, B-2, and B-52
bombers based on Diego Garcia dropped hundreds of thousands of pounds of ordnance on Iraq’s battlefields, killing thousands. From this perspective the Chagossians’ expulsion is unsurprising: Their ancestors’ enslaved arrival in Chagos was the result of a European empire’s efforts to claim bases in a strategic ocean; their removal was the result of a similar search by a new empire two centuries later.

On the other hand, Diego Garcia shows us how the U.S. Empire is a dramatically new kind of empire. Unlike its predecessors, the United States exercises control over other nations and peoples not primarily through colonies but through its base network and a range of other military, economic, and political tools. Anthropologist Enseng Ho explains that the United States has become an empire symbolized by
invisibility
and
remote control
. “The passing of the baton” from previous empires, he writes, “is marked by the progress from gunboat diplomacy to aerial bombing.” Now “remote control bombers fly ever higher out of sight, while military advisors disappear into the Filipino jungles, Yemeni mountains, and Georgian gorges. As well, security, military, and colonial functions are farmed out to private companies, removing them from political oversight.”
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That the United States has become an empire of invisibility goes further: As the power of the United States has grown since World War II, the Chagossians and increasing numbers of people around the world have found themselves subject to the actions of the U.S. Government but lack legal recourse to challenge their treatment in U.S. courts. The government and its officials have thus increasingly conducted activities that, while illegal in the United States, are invisible to the U.S. Constitution and U.S. laws when conducted abroad. Recent examples include the decision to hold terrorist suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. At Guantánamo, the Bush administration and later Congress withheld from detainees the
habeas corpus
right to a trial and other rights generally due people on U.S. soil. Similarly, the CIA’s use of “extraordinary rendition,” sending detainees to nations known to use torture as an interrogation technique, allowed the agency and its employees to attempt to circumvent laws and treaties banning torture. “In consequence,” Ho says, “the U.S. enjoys rights in [other] lands but owes no legally demandable obligation to foreigners there. . . . Without recourse to U.S. law, prisoners at Guantánamo are subject to the unchecked and therefore tyrannical power of the U.S. president.”
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So it is for most U.S. military bases and troops abroad where status of forces agreements generally give the United States, its troops and civilians, broad powers little constrained by local, U.S., or international law.
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Maintaining this immunity from prosecution overseas is precisely one of
the reasons why the Bush administration prevented the United States from joining the International Criminal Court.

And so it is for the Chagossians, as well as for any prisoners currently or previously held on Diego Garcia: If such acts had taken place within the United States, the U.S. Government, its executive agencies or officials could likely be challenged for violating U.S. law and the Constitution. Because the acts that were committed against the Chagossians took place outside U.S. soil, however, courts have upheld total federal and individual immunity. “Living outside of direct colonial rule,” the islanders have fallen “within the purview of its empire” but are “condemned to invisibility by the U.S. Constitution.”
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So far U.S. courts have allowed them no legal recourse whatsoever; those responsible for their expulsion have gotten off scot-free.

THE EFFECTS OF EMPIRE AND WHAT WE MUST DO

We are the descendants of slaves. Our skin is black. We don’t have blue eyes. . . . Whether we are black, whether we are white, whether we are yellow, we all must have the same treatment. That is the treatment that the Chagossian community is asking for. At least give us our chance to live. Give us our chance to live like every other human being. Stop all the injustices that have been committed against us.

—Olivier Bancoult, President, Chagos Refugees Group, 2004

As we consider the empire that the United States has become, we must face the damage that the nation has inflicted on families like Rita Bancoult’s and so many others. We cannot allow the harmful effects of U.S. Empire, too often ignored or given short shrift by empire’s proponents and others, to continue. We cannot continue to allow claims of “national interest” to justify the destruction of the lives of others.

The story of Diego Garcia is in many ways a story of just that: how we have allowed empire and militarism to trump human lives.
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“The military expansionists in our Defense and State Departments push on inexorably like a giant bulldozer,” Iowa Senator John Culver testified on the one day Congress has ever thought about the Chagossians, “oblivious to diplomatic options, oblivious to violations of human rights. . . . What happens is the means become the end and military expansionism in effect assumes command of our foreign policy.”
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To unmake the ways in which our ability to make both war and money has trumped human lives, we must shift U.S. foreign policy and the national security bureaucracy that runs it away from deep-seated imperial instincts, away from the pursuit of economic and military interests benefiting the few, away from engrained hierarchical notions that some human lives are more valuable than others. We must shift our foreign policy toward a consideration of people’s lives and the impact of the nation’s actions on human beings above all else. We must begin to pursue a “humanpolitik”—a human-centered foreign policy based around international cooperation and diplomacy that places human lives, regardless of nation, above perceived and shortsighted notions of national interest and security. Self-described “realists” will say that such an approach isn’t realistic. The Chagossians and more than half a century of this aggressive and tragic form of U.S. Empire, which has brought death and destruction abroad and helped create unparalleled inequality and bankruptcy at home, demand that we ask, “Realistic for whom?”

As a start, here is some of what we should do to redress the damage and prevent future harm.

The Chagossians

As with other victims of base displacement, the United States and the United Kingdom must immediately restore the right to return, in this case to all of Chagos including Diego Garcia. Because this is a largely symbolic right without the infrastructure to support life on the islands or the means to return, the two nations should, under the direction of the islanders, commence reconstruction of inhabitable islands and finance resettlement for those wishing to return.

Consultants working with the people as well as four decades of military habitation on Diego Garcia have already demonstrated the feasibility of restoring and maintaining life in Chagos. The islanders are exploring plans for tourism, fishing, and coconut industries; with lodging in private island hotels and beachside resorts going for upwards of $7,000 a night in Mauritius and the Seychelles just imagine the possibilities in the even more exclusive Chagos.

Making resettlement feasible would necessitate the cooperation of the U.S. Government and the base. In line with long-term Chagossian demands, the U.S. military and its contractors should immediately cease all employment discrimination barring islanders from civilian employment on the base. The military and its contractors should take further compensatory
steps to hire any members of the community interested in working on the base, to establish a permanent employment preference for Chagossians, and to create a comprehensive training program to prepare islanders for skilled base and other employment.

To enable the importation of materials necessary for reconstruction of the islands’ infrastructure, the U.S. military should allow use of the airport on Diego Garcia or finance the creation of a civilian runway elsewhere in the archipelago. In addition to opening up existing civilian housing on the base to newly employed Chagossian workers, both the U.S. and U.K. governments should enable the resettlement of parts of the eastern arm of Diego Garcia that are unused by base operations and far from the base itself. In an ironic and unintended monument to the expulsion, base employees already groom and maintain much of the islanders’ village at East Point for the recreation of off-duty troops.