Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (4 page)

While I was never paid for my work, ironically enough, big tobacco helped foot some of the bill: Tigar reimbursed my expenses out of a human rights litigation fund he had established at American University with attorney fees won in a Texas tobacco suit.
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Not long after starting the project, however, I saw there was another side of the story that I wanted to understand. In addition to exploring the impact of the expulsion on the Chagossians, I wanted to tell the story of the United States and the U.S. Government officials who ordered the removals and created the base: How and why, I wanted to know, did my country and its officials do this?
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Between 2001 and 2008, I conducted research with both the islanders and some of the now mostly retired U.S. officials. To understand something of the fabric and texture of Chagossians’ lives in exile, I lived in their communities in Mauritius and the Seychelles for more than seven months over four trips between 2001 and 2004. This meant living in the homes of Chagossian families and participating actively in their daily lives. I did everything with the people from working, cooking, studying, cleaning, praying, and watching French-dubbed Brazilian telenovelas on Mauritian TV to attending weddings, baptisms, first communions, public meetings, birthday parties, and funerals. In addition to hundreds of informal conversations, I conducted more than thirty formal interviews in Mauritian Kreol, Seselwa (Seychelles Kreol), English, and French, and, with the help of dedicated Mauritian interviewers, completed a large survey of living conditions with more than 320 islanders. I complemented this work by going to the British Public Records Office and the national archives of Mauritius and the Seychelles to unearth thousands of pages of historical and documentary records about the history of Chagos, the expulsion, and its aftermath.
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Back in the United States, I moved from New York to my hometown of Washington, DC, to try to understand the officials responsible for the base and the expulsion. I had no interest in turning them into caricatures, and wanted to dedicate the same anthropological attention and empathy to them that I had focused on the islanders.
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During more than seven months of concentrated research in 2004 and 2005, and continuing over the next two years, I interviewed more than thirty former and current U.S. Government officials, primarily from the departments of Defense and State and the Navy, as well as journalists, academics, military analysts, and others who were involved in the story or otherwise knowledgeable about the base.
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Unfortunately, I was unable to speak with some of the highest-ranking and most influential officials involved. Many, including White House official Robert Komer and Admirals Elmo Zumwalt and Arleigh Burke,
were deceased. Two, Paul Nitze and Admiral Thomas Moorer, died early in my research before I could request an interview. Others, including Henry Kissinger, did not respond to repeated interview requests.

After repeatedly attempting to contact Robert McNamara, I was surprised to return to my office one day to find the following voicemail: “Professor Vine. This is Robert McNamara. I don’t believe I can help you. At 91, my memory is very, very bad. And I recall almost nothing about Diego Garcia. Thank you.”

When I hurriedly called him back and asked if he had any memory of conversations about people on the island, he responded, “None.”

When I asked why the Department of Defense would have wanted to remove the Chagossians, he said, “At 91, my memory’s bad.”

I asked if he could recommend anyone else to speak with. “No,” he replied. I asked if he could suggest any other leads. “None,” he said. Fumbling around to think what else I could ask, I heard McNamara say quickly, “Thank you very much,” and then the click of the connection going dead.

With these kinds of limitations, I balanced my interviews with an analysis of thousands of pages of government documents uncovered in the U.S. National Archives, the Navy archives, the Kennedy and Johnson presidential libraries, the British Public Records Office, and the files of the U.S. and British lawyers representing the Chagossians.
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While the Navy’s archives proved a critical resource, all the files from Stu Barber’s office responsible for the original base idea had been destroyed.
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While many of the relevant surviving documents were still classified (after 30–40 years), Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests revealed some formerly secret information. However, government agencies withheld hundreds of documents, claiming various FOIA exemptions “in the interest of national defense or foreign relations.” Tens of other documents were released to me “in part”; this often meant receiving page after page partially or entirely blank. Britain’s “30 year rule” for the automatic release of most classified government documents, by contrast, revealed hundreds of pages of critical material, much of it originally uncovered by the Chagossians’ U.K. legal team and a Mauritian investigative reporter and contributing to the 2000 victory.
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Like trying to describe an object you can’t actually see, telling the story of Diego Garcia was further complicated by not being able to go to Diego Garcia. The 1976 U.S.-U.K. agreement for the base restricts access “to members of the forces of the United Kingdom and of the United States” and their official representatives and contractors.
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A 1992 document explains,
“the intent is to restrict visits in order . . . to prevent excessive access to military operations and activities.”
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Visits by journalists have been explicitly banned, making the island something of a “holy grail” for reporters (only technically claimed by the recent ninety-minute visit of President Bush’s reporting pool, during which reporters were confined to an airport hangar). In the 1980s, a
Time
magazine chief offered a “fine case of Bordeaux to the first correspondent who filed a legitimate story from Diego Garcia.”
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The U.S.-U.K. agreement does allow visits by approved “scientific parties wishing to carry out research.” Indeed scientists, including experts on coral atolls and the Royal Navy Bird Watching Society, have regularly surveyed Diego Garcia and the other Chagos islands. Encouraged, I repeatedly requested permission from both U.S. and U.K. representatives to visit and conduct research on the islanders’ former society. After months of trading letters with British officials in 2003 and 2004, I finally received word from Charles Hamilton, the British Indian Ocean Territory administrator, stating that “after careful consideration, we are unable to agree at the present time to a scientific visit involving a survey of the former homes of the Chagossians. I am sorry to have to send you such disappointing news.”
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All my other requests were denied or went unanswered. John Pike described the chance of a civilian visiting Diego Garcia as “about as likely as the sun coming up in the west.”

Still, if I had had a yacht at my disposal, I could have joined hundreds of other “yachties” who regularly visit Peros Banhos, Salomon, and other islands in Chagos far from Diego Garcia. (Enterprising journalist Simon Winchester convinced one to take him to Chagos in 1985, even managing to get onto Diego Garcia when his Australian captain claimed her right to safe harbor under the law of the sea.
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) Many yachties today enjoy the “island paradise” for months at a time. They simply pay a fee to the BIOT for the right to stay in the territory and enjoy beachside barbeques by the “impossibly blue” water, parties with BIOT officials, and free range over the islands and the Chagossians’ crumbling homes. “Welcome to the B.I.O.T.,” a sign reads. “Please keep the island clean and avoid damage to buildings. Enjoy your stay.”
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Sadly, the Chagossians are far from alone in having been displaced by a military base. As we will see in the story ahead, the U.S. military has exhibited a pattern of forcibly displacing vulnerable peoples to build its military bases. In the past century, most of these cases have taken place
outside the United States. Generally those displaced have, like the Chagossians, been small in number, under colonial control, and of non-“white,” non-European ancestry. Some of the examples are relatively well known, like those displaced in the Bikini Atoll and Puerto Rico’s Vieques Island. Others have, like the Chagossians, received less attention, including the Inughuit of Thule, Greenland, and the more than 3,000 Okinawans displaced to, of all places, Bolivia.

It is no coincidence that few know about these stories. Few in the United States know that the United States possesses some 1,000 military bases and installations outside the fifty states and Washington, DC, on the sovereign land of other nations. Let me repeat that number again because it’s hard to take in: 1,000 bases. On other people’s sovereign territory. 1,000 bases.

More than half a century after the end of World War II and the Korean War, the United States retains 287 bases in Germany, 130 in Japan, and 106 in South Korea. There are some 89 in Italy, 57 in the British Isles, 21 in Portugal, and nineteen in Turkey. Other bases are scattered around the globe in places like Aruba and Australia, Djibouti, Egypt, and Israel, Singapore and Thailand, Kyrgyzstan and Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, Crete, Sicily, and Iceland, Romania and Bulgaria, Honduras, Colombia, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—just to name a few (see
fig. 2.1
). Some can still be found in Saudi Arabia and others have recently returned to the Philippines and Uzbekistan, where locals previously forced the closure of U.S. bases. In total, the U.S. military has troops in some 150 foreign nations. Around the world the Defense Department reports having more than 577,519 separate buildings, structures, and utilities at its bases, conservatively valuing its facilities at more than $712 billion.
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It’s often hard to come up with accurate figures to capture the scope of the base network, because the Pentagon frequently omits secret and even well-known bases—like those in Iraq and Afghanistan—in its own accounting. In Iraq, as President Bush’s second term came to an end, the military controlled at least 55 bases and probably well over 100. In trying to negotiate a long-term military agreement with the Iraqi Government, the Bush administration hoped to retain 58 long-term bases in the country as part of a “protracted” presence of at least 50,000 troops, following the South Korean model; originally U.S. officials pressed for more than 200 military facilities. In Afghanistan, the base collection includes sixteen air bases and may run to over eighty in total amid similar Pentagon plans for permanent installations.
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While Pentagon and other officials have been careful never to refer to bases in Iraq and Afghanistan as “permanent,” the structures on the ground
tell a different story: A 2007 National Public Radio story reported that Balad Air Base near Baghdad, one of five “mega bases” in Iraq, housed some 30,000 troops and 10,000 private contractors in facilities complete with fortified Pizza Hut, Burger King, and Subway outlets and two shopping centers each about the size of a Target or Wal-Mart. “The base is one giant construction project, with new roads, sidewalks, and structures going up across this 16-square-mile fortress in the center of Iraq, all with an eye toward the next few decades,” Guy Raz explained. “Seen from the sky at night, the base resembles Las Vegas: While the surrounding Iraqi villages get about 10 hours of electricity a day, the lights never go out at Balad Air Base.”
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If you are anything like me and grew up in the United States, you may have a hard time imagining another nation occupying a military base on your nation’s territory—let alone living next to such “simulacrums of suburbia” found the world over.
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In 2007, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa offered some insight into this phenomenon when he told reporters that he would only renew the lease on the U.S. military base in Ecuador if the United States agreed to one condition: “They let us put a base in Miami—an Ecuadorian base.”

“If there’s no problem having foreign soldiers on a country’s soil,” Correa added, “surely they’ll let us have an Ecuadorian base in the United States.”

The idea of an Ecuadorian military base in Miami, of a foreign base anywhere in the United States, is unthinkable to most people in the United States. And yet this is exactly what thousands of people in countries around the world live with every day: Military forces from a foreign country living in their cities, building huge military complexes on their lands, occupying their nations. About 95 percent of these foreign bases belong to the United States. Today the United States likely possesses more bases than any nation or people in world history.
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Not to be confined to the globe alone, the Pentagon is making plans to turn outer space into a base as part of the rapid militarization of space.
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Growing recognition about the U.S. overseas base network has mirrored a renewed acknowledgment among scholars and pundits, following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, that the United States is in fact an empire.
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With even the establishment foreign policy journal
Foreign Affairs
declaring, “The debate on empire is back,” conversation has centered less on
if
the United States is an empire and more on
what kind
of empire it has become.
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