Thoughts from London

Another lesson in British duplicity
Remember Diego Garcia? No? Well it is not surprising. Little appears in the news media about this island in the Chagos Archipelago lying about 800-1000 nautical miles southwest of Sri Lanka and in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Some 35 years ago Diego Garcia was very much in the news. The non-aligned nations were very vocal about it. As far as I remember there was not one non-aligned summit Declaration since the late 1960s that did not contain a separate section on Diego Garcia condemning the United States communications and later military base on it.

In Asia, India and Sri Lanka were in the forefront of this condemnation of US intrusion into the Indian Ocean and for introducing nuclear weapons into the region.

In the early 1970s the then prime minister Sirima Bandaranaike moved a resolution at the United Nations calling for the Indian Ocean to be declared a peace zone and urging the major powers to stay out of it. That resolution was strongly backed by India and later adopted by the UN.

That, of course, was at the height of the Cold War when East-West confrontation was intense in our part of the world. But with the implosion of the Soviet Union and the Cold War officially ended, the US reigns supreme. So the voices that were once raised loudly against the US military presence in Diego Garcia and American naval activity in the Indian Ocean, have been stilled.

US military power and the almighty dollar have muted any criticism of the extension of American power into the Indian Ocean that might otherwise have been heard in international forums and the councils of the developing world.

This diminishing international interest in Diego Garcia and the rest of the archipelago and the people who once lived there, for which the media is partly responsible, has allowed the British Government (and by extension the US) to get away with one of the most shocking and shameful episodes in modern British colonial history.

While Tony Blair preaches democracy and the rule of law to everyone from the Middle East to Africa, his government and previous Labour governments have been guilty of acts that have their parallels in medieval times.

The incredible story of the duplicity of British governments from the time of Harold Wilson to that of Tony Blair might well have remained hidden in the annals of the foreign office and the recesses of official record rooms.

But the investigative efforts of journalists, academics and human rights activists, determined to expose to public light the callousness that lies behind Diego Garcia, have stopped efforts to sweep the whole sordid affair under the carpet.

Last week investigative journalist John Pilger's documentary on British duplicity in depopulating Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands and creating a safe military base for their transatlantic cousins was telecast on ITV.

Pilger's documentary is the latest attempt to keep the Diego Garcia story alive and in the public domain, while a few of the original inhabitants of these islands continue their legitimate struggle against the colonial power, to return to their homes.

The story goes back to the mid-1960s when the US was in search of a secure base in the Indian Ocean to meet what Washington perceived as the Soviet threat from the North and Chinese communist expansionism from the East- domino theory and all.

In February 1964 a secret Anglo-American conference was held in London to discuss these geopolitical and military issues. It was then that this obscure archipelago where the RAF had built an emergency wartime airstrip surfaced.

At this time independence for the Seychelles and Mauritius, both British colonies, was under consideration. During the negotiations with Mauritius, the then Labour government insisted Britain be allowed to retain the Chagos Archipelago which was a part of Mauritius.

In return, the Mauritius Government received £3 million and assurances that the US would consider sympathetically allowing imports of Mauritian sugar.

The British hid from Mauritius its intention of leasing the islands that came to be known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), to the US. That lease runs out in 2016 but with the option of extending it for another 20 years.

The BIOT, like other similar territories such as The Falklands and Cayman Islands became another relic of empire. Washington wanted the islands without encumbrances. The territory was to be handed over "fully sanitized" and "swept", according to US documents. Not even dogs should be left, thank you.

The British, ever willing to do American bidding as is so visible even today, put the Governor of Seychelles, Sir Bruce Greatbatch in charge of the sanitising project. Greatbatch did a great job. He gassed over 1000 dogs, the pets of the inhabitants.

But getting rid of the inhabitants proved more difficult. So the British resorted to the usual colonial ruses. The British Foreign Office website states that the islands "were detached in 1965 from Mauritius and Seychelles and the settled inhabitants, some 1200 persons, were subsequently relocated to these two countries." British officialdom has either a penchant for supreme understatement or this is in the great tradition of official lies and prevarications so clearly proved in the run up to the Iraq war when Saddam's weapons were said to be a grave and imminent threat even to British interests and continues even today.

The inhabitants, called Chagossians or Ilois, who had gone to Mauritius for supplies or medical treatment were banned from returning. Others still at home were shipped with one suitcase of worldly possessions, and dumped in Seychelles or Mauritius where those who did not die still live in slums and have turned to crime and prostitution for survival. They are barred from returning to their homes.

In November 2000 the islanders won a historic court verdict in the London High Court that ruled their expulsions illegal and granted them the right to return.

But the Foreign Office claimed such a return was not possible because of a "treaty" with Washington, which as Pilger states, was actually a deal hidden from both the British parliament and the US Congress.

Such is the Blair government's respect for the rule of law and human rights, that in June it resorted to an archaic royal prerogative- an order-in-council, to negate the 2000 High Court verdict and to ban forever the islanders from returning home.

Britain is a great advocate of democracy, the rule of law, human rights and what not. For centuries the British roamed the seas, robbing native people of their land and resources.

But to do so in the 21st century is an act of utter shamelessness against the backdrop of its own sanctimonious advice to others. Tony Blair is wondering how he would be remembered in history, his legacy to British politics. He led at the beginning and misled thereafter might be a fit epitaph for Teflon Tony.

Back to Columns