Where international law stops

A thesis on Chagos and international law: Chagos - Where international law stops, Utrecht 2012, written by Mihai Martoiu Ticu.

New colonial objections against return of Chagossians

The manoeuvres by which the Chagossians were evicted from their islands in the Indian Ocean, the late 1960s and early 1970s, so to enable the US to operate an air base on Diego Garcia, do not show the UK Foreign Office in its best light. Indeed, after a severe rebuke from the courts in 2000, the FCO accepted that the original law underlying their departure was unlawful, and agreed to investigate their possible resettlement on some of their islands. The first of these new cases is an environmental information appeal concerning the next phase of the story – how the FCO decided that it was not feasible to resettle the islanders in 2002-2004. This decision was taken in the modern way – backed by a feasibility study prepared by consultants supporting the stance which the FCO ultimately were to take. And this case concerns the islanders’ attempts to get documents lying behind and around the taking of this decision. From the islanders’ point of view, this decision by the FCO was more of the same. Unfeasible and uneconomic resettlement suited the FCO nicely. Yes, we moved you unlawfully 30 years ago, but you have to stay where you are because we now say it is impractical to move you back. The FCO countered – it is unfeasible, the islands need significant investment in infrastructure and employment (which the Chagossians could not provide from their own resources), and our consultants who carried out the review agree with us.

Further reading.

Forgotten Island

 Alex Doherty

Diego Garcia is the largest island in the Chagos archipelago - a group of more than fifty islands in the Indian Ocean. Formerly part of the British colony of Mauritius Diego Garcia is now a huge American naval base. Used to launch strikes against Iraq both during "Operation Desert Storm" and during the recent invasion Diego Garcia was also a vital asset in the bombing of another essentially defenceless target- Afghanistan.

When Mauritius was negotiating its independence the British Government insisted that the Chagos islands must remain under British sovereignty. Unknown to the Mauritian government the British had already made a deal to lease the islands to the United States. However as a condition of the deal the US insisted that the islands must be emptied of its human population and so from 1968 to 1974 Britain carried out, in secret, the removal of the entire population of the islands.

Interestingly Diego Garcia was not the US’ preferred [site] for its naval base; they had originally favoured the island of Aldabra. However that island was populated by a rare species of tortoise and the US feared that any attempt to disturb them might lead to an embarrassing confrontation with publicity savvy green activists. They guessed, rightly as it turned out, that while the removal of endangered tortoises would raise protest, the removal of mere human beings would elicit rather less concern.

A variety of methods were employed to spirit the population from the islands. Chagossian's making routine trips to Mauritius were simply barred from returning to the islands, others were lured by offers of free trips to the mainland and were never to return. Finally Britain forcibly removal of the remaining population. In 1966 foreign office diplomat Dennis Greenhill remarked, with all the studied indifference of Britain's educated elite, that: "along with the birds go some... Man Fridays whose origins are obscure"

Most of these "Man Fridays", who now number around five thousand individuals, found themselves living in the slums of the Mauritian capital Port Louis. Some died of starvation whilst the rest scraped a bare existence working in the lowest paid jobs. Unemployment amongst the Chagossians is high; they are discriminated against and have found adapting to life in Mauritius unbearably hard.

British policy during and after the removal process was to "maintain the pretence that there were no permanent inhabitants." This was essential because "to recognise that there are permanent inhabitants will imply that there is a population whose democratic rights will have to be safeguarded."

Since their forced removal the Chagossians have been campaigning for their right to return to the islands, a campaign that has been frustrated at every turn by successive British governments. In 2000 the campaigners achieved a partial victory in the High Court, which ruled that the removal of the islanders was a "legal failure" and that the islanders could return to the outlying islands (though not Diego Garcia itself). The British Government refused to implement the ruling; making no attempt to rebuild the infrastructure on the outlying islands, whilst falsely claiming that resettlement was not feasible.

On October 9th 2003 the High Court ruled against the islanders' right to return to Diego Garcia claiming, against all the evidence, that "it could not be maintained that Britain had deliberately deceived the Chagossians."

Following the ruling Richard Gifford, a lawyer representing the islanders remarked that "when you have been kicked around for 30 years, you get a bit used to setbacks."

- Looking for the most infamous quote from the Colonial Office in Westminster I only found this story on the net on a site (or a portal?) in Arabic of which I do not understand anything, frankly.

Guantánamo’s ghosts and the shame of Diego Garcia

Andy Worthington

One of the more sordid and long-running stories in Anglo-American colonial history –- that of Diego Garcia, the chief island of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean –- reared its ugly head again on Friday when the UK’s all-party foreign affairs committee announced plans to investigate long-standing allegations that the CIA has, since 2002, held and interrogated al-Qaeda suspects at a secret prison on the island.

The shameful tale of Diego Garcia began in 1961, when it was marked out by the US military as a crucial geopolitical base. Ignoring the fact that 2,000 people already lived there, and that the island –- a British colony since the fall of Napoleon –- had been settled in the late 18th century by French coconut planters, who shipped in African- and Indian-born labourers from Mauritius, establishing what John Pilger called “a gentle Creole nation with thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a prison, a railway, docks, a copra plantation,” the Labour government of Harold Wilson conspired with the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to “sweep” and “sanitize” the islands (the words come from American documents that were later declassified).

Although many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, a British Foreign Office official wrote in 1966 that the government’s aim was “to convert all the existing residents … into short-term, temporary residents,” so that they could be exiled to Mauritius. Having removed the “Tarzans or Men Fridays,” as another British memo described the inhabitants, the British effectively ceded control of the islands to the Americans, who established a base on Diego Garcia, which, over the years, has become known as “Camp Justice,” complete with “over 2,000 troops, anchorage for 30 warships, a nuclear dump, a satellite spy station, shopping malls, bars and a golf course.” So thoroughly were the islands cleared –- and so stealthy the procedure –- that in the 1970s the British Ministry of Defence had the effrontery to insist, “There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation.”

Further reading.