Diego Garcia?How the Brits deported a nation

By John Pilger, Z Magazine, 22 October 2004

Three forgotten, grainy films shot more than 40 years ago reveal the 
evidence of a crime committed by British governments against some of 
its most vulnerable citizens. What they tell is a shocking, almost 
incredible story in which the Blair Government has played a major part. 
One of the films, made in 1957 by the government's Colonial Film Unit, 
shows the people of the Chagos islands, a British Crown colony in the 
Indian Ocean. 

The setting is idyllic; a coral archipelago lying midway between 
Africa and Asia: a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace where, says 
the commentator, most of the people have lived for generations. There 
are thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a railway, 
docks, a copra plantation. In the second film, shot by missionaries, 
the islanders' beloved dogs splash in a sheltered, palm-fringed lagoon 
catching fish; and there is a line of proud mothers, in their finery, 
with their babies awaiting their baptism. Here surely was Britain's 
Empire at its most benign. 

The third film marks the end of all this: an act of ruthlessness and 
duplicity with few Imperial parallels. The year is 1961; a stocky man 
strides ashore in Diego Garcia, the main island of the Chagos group. 

He is Rear-Admiral Grantham of the US Navy and his visit is followed 
by a top secret Anglo-American survey of the island for a military base?
one of the biggest American bases outside the United States: what the 
Pentagon in Washington calls an indispensable platform for policing the 
world. Today on Diego Garcia there are more than 2,000 American troops, 
anchorage for 30 ships, including nuclear-armed aircraft carriers, a 
satellite spy station and two of the world's longest runways from which 
B-52 and Stealth bombers have attacked Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Through the vapour haze as the bombers take off you can just see, on 
the other side of the lagoon, the broken villages: the houses claimed 
by the jungle, some still with their furniture, pictures and other 
personal belongings that were left the day the people were expelled. 

Roaming wild are their donkeys and dogs that are now feral, but there 
are few of these descendants of the islanders' pets. As the Americans 
began to build their billion-dollar base 30 years ago Sir Bruce 
Greatbatch, KCVO, CMG, MBE, governor of the Seychelles, ordered all the 
dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. More than 1,000 pets were gassed 
with exhaust fumes. They put the dogs in a furnace where the people 
worked, Lisette Talatte, in her 60s, told me, and when their dogs were 
taken away in front of them our children screamed and cried. 

Sir Bruce had been given responsibility for what the Americans called 
cleansing and sanitising the islands; and the killing of the pets was 
taken by the islanders as a warning. For what had been agreed between 
Washington and Whitehall in secrecy was that the 2,000 Chagos islanders 
would be forced from their homeland. A 1965 Foreign Office memorandum 
describes how the Americans made the expulsion of the entire population 
virtually a condition of the agreement. As for the gentle Creoles they 
were throwing out, these people have little aptitude for anything other 
than growing coconuts. They are, wrote Sir Bruce Greatbatch, 
unsophisticated and untrainable. In other words, expendable. 

Files found in the National Archives in Washington and Public Record 
Office in London provide clear evidence of a conspiracy between the 
Labour government of Harold Wilson and two American administrations in 
the form of a searing narrative of official lying that will be all too 
familiar to those who have chronicled the lies over Iraq. The 
conspiracy got under way with the creation of a fake colony called the 
British Indian Ocean Territory, or BIOT. The sole purpose of this was 
to get rid of the people. 

To do it, the Foreign Office invented the fiction that the islanders 
were transient contract workers who could be returned to Mauritius and 
the Seychelles, 1,000 miles away. This was the equivalent of returning 
the majority of Australians, whose ancestry dates from 1770, the same 
year the first islanders settled in the Chagos. The aim, wrote a 
Foreign Office official in 1966, is to convert all the existing 
residents into shortterm, temporary residents. What the files also 
reveal is an attitude of brutality and contempt. 

In August 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the 
Foreign Office, wrote: We must surely be very tough about this. The 
object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours. 
There will be no indigenous population except seagulls. At the end of 
this is a handwritten note by DH Greenhill, later Baron Greenhill of 
Harrow. Along with the birds go some Tarzans or Men Fridays? Under the 
heading Maintaining The Fiction, another official urges his colleagues 
to reclassify the islanders as a floating population and to make up the 
rules as we go along. 

As for the United Nations and international law, which invested in the 
remaining colonial powers a sacred trust to protect the basic human 
rights of their citizens in dependent territories, a senior Foreign 
Office official proposed a policy of 'quiet disregard'?in other words, 
let's forget about this one until the United Nations challenge us on 
it. Reading these documents, I could find not a single word of concern 
for the suffering caused or even recognition that Britain was, in 
effect, kidnapping its own citizens. There is worry about the press 
finding out and damaging publicity and now and then the conspirators 
appear to get the wind up. This is all fairly unsatisfactory, wrote one 
official, We propose to certify these people, more or less 
fraudulently, as belonging somewhere else? 

The cover-up went right to the top. In 1968 Foreign Secretary Michael 
Stewart wrote that by any stretch of the English language, there was an 
indigenous population and the Foreign Office knew it. Yet on April 21, 
1969, in a secret minute to Harold Wilson, Stewart proposed that the 
government lie to the UN by present(ing) any move as a change of 
employment for contract workers?rather than as a population 
resettlement. 

Five days later Wilson gave his approval, which was copied to senior 
members of the Cabinet. At first the islanders were tricked into 
leaving; those needing urgent medical care in Mauritius were prevented 
from returning home. There is a photograph taken outside the 
administrator's office on Diego Garcia. It is a haunting image, taken 
in 1973, not long after the massacre of the dogs. The stunned crowd has 
just been told their islands have been sold and they are to be 
expelled. 

They could take only one suitcase. On one journey in rough seas the 
copra company's horses occupied the deck, while women and children 
slept on a cargo of bird fertiliser. Arriving in the Seychelles they 
were held in a prison until they were transported to Mauritius. In the 
first years of exile suicides were common. Elaine and Michel Mouza: 
mother and child committed suicide, said a report in 1975. Josie and 
Maude Baptiste: poverty?no roof, no food, committed suicide. Lisette 
Talatte lost two children. The doctor said he cannot treat sadness, she 
told me. Rita Bancoult, now 79, lost two daughters and a son; she told 
me that when her husband was informed the family could never return 
home, he suffered a stroke and died. 

Only after more than a decade did the islanders receive compensation: 
less than 3,000 pounds each. In 2000 the High Court ruled their 
expulsion illegal. However, the Blair Government, although it did not 
appeal the decision, blocked them from going home by conjuring up a 
feasibility study to determine whether the islands could be resettled. 
It found they were sinking?perhaps under the weight of the thousands of 
US servicemen, their bars, barbecues and bombers. In 2003 the islanders 
were denied compensation in a now notorious High Court case, with the 
judge referring to we as if the Foreign Office and the court were on 
the same side. 

Last June the Government invoked a royal prerogative?a decree?to 
overturn the 2000 decision, bypass Parliament and ban the islanders 
from ever going home. Last week, after the screening of my documentary 
on ITV, this epic struggle turned yet another corner when the High 
Court agreed to a judicial review of the royal decree. The islanders, 
led by Olivier Bancoult, who went into exile as a child, and their 
extraordinary London lawyer, Richard Gifford, say that if this fails 
they will head for the European Court of Human Rights. 

Article Seven of the new International Criminal Court leaves little 
doubt that what was done to these gentle, tenacious people was a crime 
against humanity. As Bush's bombers take off from their homeland, his 
collaborator in Downing Street might reflect on that. 

John Pilger's ITV documentary, Stealing A Nation, can be ordered on 
video. Write to: Video Library, ITV1, Gas Street, Birmingham B1 2JT, 
UK. If you would like to help the islanders, you can give to the Ilois 
(islanders) Support Trust. The London bank account is Natwest, No 
90213319, sort code 60-30-06. 

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html

To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤