Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (35 page)

A return to Diego Garcia and the rest of Chagos raises questions about islander self-determination and the life of the base. As in its other “overseas territories” and as mandated by the UN, the United Kingdom should assist with the creation of forms of local selfgovernance. As democratic rule develops, the continued tenancy of the base, and any conditions thereof, as well as the islands’ sovereignty, should be matters of local self-determination.

While the above steps are crucial to enable a return, resettlement should be treated as only one part of a proper reparations agreement. Given the responsibility of both governments for orchestrating and carrying out the expulsion and for the impoverishment that has followed, both nations should finance a significant compensation fund. This should include a lifetime pension and a comprehensive lifetime social services package for all Chagossians, whether born in Chagos or in exile.
³⁸
Like any resettlement program or reparations effort (and in contrast to previous compensation), the people themselves should determine how monies will be distributed and spent and what social services (education, housing, health care, training, employment assistance, and others) will help guarantee their long-term security.

Indeed, as recently as 2004, British and U.S. officials have secretly discussed the creation of a “compensatory trust fund to alleviate the poverty of the most needy former Islanders.” In response to a British proposal, however, a recently declassified State Department letter indicated that while the U.S. Government shared British “concern for the plight of the former Chagos Islanders. . . . we must respectfully decline participation in this fund because, after careful review, we are unable to resolve complications this initiative would cause in our budget process and our own equities relative to this complex issue.”
³⁹
British officials have never discussed the proposal publicly.

For too long both governments have denied and hid from their responsibility. For too long they have allowed the Chagossians to languish in exile. Now is the time for both governments to rectify the injustice they have done to the Chagossians. Now is the time when both governments, both nations must bring the cruel irony that is the Footprint of Freedom to an end.

Overseas Bases

The Chagossians and the fifteen other cases of base displacement are but an extreme example of a larger well-documented pattern of damage that overseas bases inflict on local populations. The harmful impacts of bases include economic, social, cultural, health, and environmental harms, the exploitation of women, increased crime, loss of self-determination, and support for dictators and repressive undemocratic regimes. In too many recurring cases, soldiers overseas have raped, assaulted, or killed locals, most prominently of late in South Korea, Okinawa, and Italy.
⁴⁰

These and other forms of harm that the Chagossians and hundreds of other local populations suffer on a daily basis should force us to question the legal, political, and moral legitimacy of maintaining many, if not all, of the United States’ overseas bases. A first step would be to properly redress the damage caused by the United States during the development of its base network. As the Chagossians show, such damage is generally ongoing—which makes it possible and necessary for the United States to prevent future harm. This should come in the form of some kind of independent congressional investigation to expose past harms caused by overseas bases and current impacts on host communities. While the issue of financial reparations would be the most contentious, some kind of limited claims tribunal might satisfy locals and improve the accountability of extraterritorial facilities.

Just as critically, we must acknowledge how bases like Diego Garcia and occupying U.S. troops have become a major “face” of the United States, damaging the nation’s reputation, engendering grievances and anger, and generally creating antagonistic rather than cooperative relationships between the United States and others. Most dangerously, as we have seen in Saudi Arabia and Yemen and as we are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan, the existence of foreign bases creates breeding grounds for radicalism, anti-Americanism, and attacks on the United States, reducing, rather than improving, U.S. national security.

With the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq hopefully underway by the time this book goes to press, now is the time for Congress to initiate
a major reassessment of global troop deployments and our 1,000 overseas bases. Now is the time for Congress to demand the closure and consolidation of bases abroad that have silently spread around the world, causing harm to local peoples like the Chagossians and undermining U.S. and global security.

Indeed, the United States undermines its own international legitimacy and ultimately its own security so long as the bases claimed to be so critical to the nation’s security continue to depend on the insecurity of others.

HOPE

When the Chagossians finally return to Chagos, there will be jubilation but there will be no storybook ending. Too many have died in exile. Too many lives, like those of Julien, Alex, Eddy, and Rénault Bancoult, have been cut short. Too many have suffered the
sagren
of expulsion for too long.

Still, taking in the whole of the history of the Chagossians as a people, the islanders’ struggle represents a challenge not just to U.S. imperial power but to more than five centuries of injustice tied to the global expansion of European empires. In the words of their 1975 petition proclaiming, “Our ancestors were slaves on those islands, but we know that we are the heirs of those islands,” the Chagossians’ struggle says that the governments of Great Britain and the United States can’t get away with just one of the most recent injustices befalling non-European peoples.

“We are reclaiming our rights, our rights like every other human being who lives on the Earth has rights,” Olivier told me. “A right to liberty, a right—I was born on that land, my umbilical cord is buried on that land, I have a right to live on that land. It cannot be that a foreigner profits from all my wealth, profits from my sea, profits from my beaches, profits from my coconuts, profits from it all, while I’m left with nothing.”

“Chagossians are not asking for charity,” Olivier explained. “Chagossians are asking for our due for what has happened since we were deracinated. . . . For all the damages that we’ve suffered. To recognize, to give reparation. To give reparation for all the suffering that we have experienced during these years.” But, he added, “We are not only asking for money. . . . We are also asking for our islands, our fundamental rights, and our dignity.”

Although the task before us of restraining the power of the military and U.S. Empire may sound daunting; although guaranteeing fundamental rights for all human beings may sound difficult; although realizing the
highest ideals of the United States may sound like blind idealism; although restoring the true meaning of freedom—freedom for all, not just for some—may sound like a dream, the Chagossians can give us hope: five thousand people. Five thousand abused people in the Indian Ocean, led by a group of determined women and one of their sons, every day taking on the distant power of the United States and Great Britain. And winning. Five thousand people.

“I will never give up the struggle!” Rita told me. “I’ve suffered, suffered, suffered so much. And I’m still suffering.” But when they finally do win, she said, she’ll write a sega so that everyone can remember the victory.

*
As I wrote earlier, there is no biological validity to the concept of “race” or to supposed racial groups like this one. They are as fictitious biologically and scientifically as the fictions invented about the Chagossians. At the same time, as we see in this case, race and the separation of peoples into supposed racial groups are deeply real social phenomena, engrained in the minds of most human beings the world over and shaping fundamental issues like who gets protected in their homes and who gets displaced.

In 1991, the
Washington Post
received the following strongly worded letter:

It seems to me to be a good time to review whether we should now take steps to redress the inexcusably inhuman wrongs inflicted by the British at our insistence on the former inhabitants of Diego Garcia and other Chagos group islands. The costs would be trivial compared with what we invested in construction and what we gained. . . . It is my firm opinion that there was never any good reason for evicting residents from the Northern Chagos, 100 miles or more from Diego Garcia. Probably the natives could even have been safely allowed to remain on the east side of Diego Garcia atoll. . . . It would be safe to let them go back, to North Chagos certainly. Such permission, for those who still want to return, together with resettlement assistance, would go a long way to reduce our deserved opprobrium. Substantial additional compensation for 18–25 past years of misery for all evictees is certainly in order. Even if that were to cost $100,000 per family, we would be talking of a maximum of $40–50 million, modest compared with our base investment there, with the value derived from it, and with the costs of Philippine bases. If we are too poor to pay it, perhaps the Japanese or Germans or Saudis might suggest
they
would like to allocate some of their Persian Gulf contributions to it.

The letter’s author was Stu Barber.
¹

During the course of my research I tried several times to find Stu but had no success. I suspected that he had died but could find no living relatives. A small reference to his having written a memoir about his Navy career encouraged me to keep looking. A week before I was to finish this book my research assistant, Naomi Jagers, found a 2007 obituary for an Anna Barber that we suspected was his wife. The article mentioned two surviving sons. An internet search produced a phone number and an address just two miles from my old apartment in Brooklyn. Although it was after 8 p.m. on a Friday night, I rushed to call.

With the sounds of dishes being washed in the background, I found Richard Barber. He said he was Stu’s son. Trying to contain my excitement as well as nervousness about how he might react, I told him about
the book. Richard remembered his late father’s talking about the base and being “dismayed” to discover what had happened to the people after reading a copy of the Minority Rights Group’s 1985 report, “Diego Garcia: A Contrast to the Falklands.”
²

Over the next two days Richard emailed several remarkable typewritten letters his father had written on the subject. After trying to interest the
Washington Post
in picking up the story again, Stu had written an admiral who was a former Navy superior, the British Embassy in Washington, and Human Rights Watch, to implore them to help return the Chagossians to Chagos. The “cessation of the Cold War,” he wrote, “would certainly permit the return of those natives so desiring to at least the northern islands of the group, 100 miles from the U.S. base.”
³

In another letter, he made an astonishingly honest admission: The expulsion, he said, “wasn’t necessary militarily.”
⁴

According to his son, Stu received no response to his requests for help.

“As far as I know,” Richard wrote in an email, “the after-the-fact concerns expressed by the guy who thought up the idea in the first place didn’t have much impact. To me this is a poignant reminder of the extent to which many of us are more or less complicit in powerful organizations that act on imperatives ultimately beyond our individual control.”
⁵

Indeed, beyond Stu Barber and the other officials in this story, aren’t most of us complicit in the Chagossians’ exile and the suffering they experience to this day? Don’t we all share responsibility, beginning with the tax dollars that U.S. and British citizens paid to expel the islanders and build the base? Don’t the people and governments of countries like Japan, Germany, and Saudi Arabia share responsibility through financial and other contributions that assist U.S. domination of Diego Garcia and the Persian Gulf? Don’t we all share responsibility through our silence? And while the base has mostly brought militarization, war, and death to the region, has it not, through U.S. domination of oil supplies and the global economy, in some ways helped support the lives that so many of us enjoy? While culpable government actors must be held responsible for the crimes they commit, each of us must ask ourselves every time we pay our taxes, pump our gas, or return to the safety and comfort of our homes how we too are part of this story of empire and exile, and what we’re going to do about it.

MY THANKS

I am deeply grateful to so many friends who helped me with this work. First I want to thank all the Chagossians in Mauritius, the Seychelles, and England who greeted me so warmly, answered my many questions, and made so much of this research possible. Thanks especially to so many who graciously took time out of their lives to sit down for an interview or who invited me into their homes, making me always feel so much at home. I owe the same deep thanks to many former government officials and others who granted me interviews in the United States. Many invited me into their homes and offices, and I thank each of my interviewees for the time, hospitality, and thoughtful conversation you offered to someone who usually came to you as a stranger. Thank you to Michael Tigar for writing the foreword and even more importantly, for making this life-changing work possible. Thanks to Simon Winchester for generously suggesting the book’s title, one serendipitous day on a Manhattan street corner.

Profound thanks are due to several groups and individuals that helped to coordinate and make possible my work in Mauritius and the Seychelles. There is no way to thank you enough: the Chagos Refugees Group, Olivier Bancoult, Lisette Aurélie Talate, Elena Rabouine, and CRG’s executive and delegate committee members; Rita Bancoult, Mariline Bancoult, Oliver, Jessica, and Evelyna Bancoult, Mimose and Cyril Furcy, Ivo Bancoult, Marie-Ange Bancoult, Jean-Roy and Toombo Bancoult; the Chagos Committee (Seychelles), Janette Alexis, Jean-Guy Alphonse, Bernadette Dugasse, Pierre Prosper, and other committee members; the American University UNROW Human Rights Law Clinic, Meghan Colloton, Emily Creighton, and all its other incredibly dedicated students; Robin Mardemootoo, Dick Kwan Tat, Frances Kwan Tat and the Kwan Tat family, Satyendra Peerthum and the Peerthum family, Satinder Ragobur, Jean-Claude Mahoune, Julienne Barra; the committed and incredibly helpful members of the Kamarad de Resers research advisory group who oversaw and assisted with so much of my research in Mauritius: Eddy Bégue, Jenny Rabouine Bertrand, Isabelle France, Louis Rene France, Martin France, Louis Raphael Louis, Cynthia Othello, Piangnee Sweetie, Corinne Uranie, Linley Uranie; those who worked so hard on the “Kestyoner avek Chagossiens”: Daniel Anacooa, Dinesh Appayya, Micheline Arlando, Martine Ballaram, Candice Bonnefin, Dominique Percy Catherine, Tarkeeswarsing
Hurrynag, and Komadhi Mardemootoo; amazingly dedicated transcribers Diana Bablee, Micheline, and Dominique; Vijaya Teelock and Melville Molle; Diego Garcia Islanders Council and Allen Vincatassin; Chagos Social Committee, Fernand Mandarin, and Hervé Lassémillante; the University of Mauritius and the Government of Mauritius; Seychelles National Heritage Research Section, Patrick Nanty, the Seychelles Ministry of Local Government, Sports and Culture, and the Government of Seychelles; Richard Gifford and Sheridans Solicitors.