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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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read it fast -- it may get removed..
Copyright Daily Telegraph Sep 23, 2001
By far the largest contingent of the American armada grinding its way across the oceans is headed for a tiny, footprint-shaped speck of coral limestone set in the middle of the Indian Ocean, seven degrees south of the equator - an island named after the Portuguese saint's day on which it was found, but which for more than a century has been British crown property: Diego Garcia.
The island, the nearest US naval base to Afghanistan, is as secret and off-limits a place as it is possible to find on the planet. Under confidential agreements made by the British and American governments 35 years ago, only those with government permission may visit.
Despite an additional ruling that "no journalists shall be allowed on the Chagos Archipelago" I went there once, illegally, and spent a fortnight snooping around. My visit was in 1985, and it is referred to in Foreign Office papers - "he arrived in a yacht . . . was refused by immigration authorities . . . and sent on his way". Like so much else in Foreign Office submissions about Diego Garcia's extraordinary recent history, the remarks are not quite accurate.
I did indeed arrive on a yacht. I first spent 10 days on Boddam Island - of all the islands in the Salomon atoll, the one that most obviously had once been populated. It was a summertime idyll, with empty beaches and a warm sea, except that I never seemed to be quite alone. A C-130 from the Diego Garcia base flew low overhead every afternoon, its crew taking photographs of what I was doing, which was idly exploring a tiny island, making notes, drawing maps and sketching the buildings.
There used to be hundreds of people living on the islands of the group known as British Indian Ocean Territories; but so essential was the southernmost atoll, Diego Garcia, deemed to be as a staging base for the security of the West - for use in precisely such an emergency as today's - that they were all thrown off the island.
Today nearly 4,000 American sailors and contractors live on Diego Garcia. The lagoon has deep-water anchorages for as many as 30 pre- positioned equipment and munitions ships. The skyline of the island has been speared by arrays of towers, space-tracking domes, oil and fuel dumps, barracks, weapons ranges and training areas.
By the summer of last year the US government was calling Diego Garcia an "all but indispensable platform", absolutely central to American strategy for policing a large part of the world.
Yet Diego Garcia remains British, a Crown Colony little different in administrative status from the Falkland Islands. How and why did this curiosity come about? Thanks to a legal case brought by representatives of those people who were tossed off the islands back in the 1970s and which last year resulted in one of the most damning judicial verdicts on government behaviour ever to be reached by a British court, we now have the full, ignoble story.
Someone should have smelled a rat when the British government took the unusual step, in the mid 1960s, of creating Diego Garcia as a new colony.
At a secret Anglo-American conference - convened in London in February 1964 to discuss the US need for a secure base in the Indian Ocean - officials discovered that there was one obscure archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean, known as the Oil Islands because of the coconut oil that was its single export. On the most southerly and largest of the atolls, Diego Garcia, the RAF had long ago built a still usable emergency wartime airstrip. The Americans realised that the islands were still a British colony and, with the help of some adroit diplomatic footwork, it might be possible to keep them British.
The Americans had long insisted that for security reasons there should be no people living either on Diego Garcia, or on any of the outer atolls. The British assured the Americans that the people on the atolls were no more than "rotating contract personnel". To make sure, laws were passed making it illegal for anyone to come to the islands again - or, indeed, to be there in the first place - without a permit.
Were the residents of Diego Garcia in fact transients? A Colonial Office official reported in 1964 that a "small number of people were born there and, in some cases, their parents were born there too". In fact, there were more than 1,500 of these so-called Chagos islanders, and a very large number of them were technically British subjects. Many of them apparently knew of their status. A visitor in 1955 noted that the islanders were "lavish with their Union Jacks".
The discovery of the presence of more than a thousand black, wiry, Creole-speaking Britons, on islands which the British Government had promised to deliver to the Americans "swept clean", startled officials in London.
There was panic and - from the very beginning - intentional duplicity. So far as the UN was concerned, a Colonial Office official wrote, "I would advise a policy of `quiet disregard'."
In August 1966 one Patrick Wright of the Colonial Office - later Sir Patrick - sent to the British Mission at the UN a note which incorporated a gentlemen's club kind of joke. "We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks which will remain ours; there will be no indigenous population except seagulls, who have not yet got a Committee (the Status of Women Committee does not cover the rights of Birds). Unfortunately, along with the Birds go some few Tarzans and Men Fridays, whose origins are obscure, and who are being hopefully wished on to Mauritius . . ."
Over a period of 18 months beginning in 1971, a flotilla of boats entered the various harbours of the scattered atolls of the Oil Islands and evacuated every last one of the islanders, dumping them on the dockside of Port Louis in Mauritius, a thousand miles away, where they still live.
During my stay on Boddam Island I discovered a street of small two- room cottages, a church and a cemetery containing the tomb of a woman named Mrs Thompson who had died in 1932. The most prominent building was a rather splendid little mansion. On one wall I found a picture of a pretty debutante from Wiltshire, cut from a 1971 issue of Country Life. In the cottages were dishes and saucepans, toys, rotting bundles of clothes and shoes.
These, manifestly, were not the homes of "rotating contract personnel", whatever the faraway colonial rulers in London might have wanted the Americans and the UN to think.
After 10 days of languor, I decided to head down to Diego Garcia itself. I spent a day and night sailing over the choppy shallows of the Chagos Bank and managed to sneak into the lagoon and moor myself among the warships and the atomic submarines. When the British immigration officers discovered me, they were furious: they had in their briefcases faxed copies of letters the Foreign Office had written to me two years before, formally refusing me permission to come. They waved them at me and insisted that I leave.
My skipper, a tough young Australian woman, drily informed the immigration men that she was claiming the lagoon as a "port of refuge", as was her mariner's right, and that she would be staying on Diego Garcia for at least the next two days. There was nothing the authorities could do.
Inside the atoll lay an armada that made Pearl Harbour look puny. Dozens of supply ships rode at anchor, their decks loaded with tanks, rockets, trucks, earthmovers and fuel bowsers. There were frigates, destroyers and marine carriers. All kinds of aircraft landed and took off from the runway: fighters, bombers, fuel tankers and tank- killers.
The crew of an American nuclear submarine took pity on our boat, which was under constant surveillance from the shore: they took us to dinner on board, and told us how tedious it was to be stationed there for weeks on end. Diego Garcia might be a vital defence establishment: but for those based there, there was nothing at all to do. "No women," said one of the American sailors mournfully. "They say there used to be civilians here. Why did they throw them off, for God's sake?"
The British authorities finally threw us out, by threatening to convene the local Supreme Court - actually a retired judge living in faraway Devon. So we left. A Royal Navy launch followed us until we were out in the open ocean again.
I have never been allowed back. The closest I have been since is Mauritius, where Les Ilois, as they are called, still live. There, late last year, I met a woman, Rosalyn Rabrin, who for almost 30 years, since she was 10 years old, has lived in a windowless tin shack in a shabby area of Port Louis. Mrs Rabrin is, by law, by birth and by choice, a British subject.
She and her children, two girls, have passports that declare them to be British Dependent Territories Citizens - a curiously British underclass of citizen who, one day, may possibly be able to live legally full-time in Britain (the House of Commons is still considering this idea). For now she lives in the same shack that accommodated her when she arrived in Mauritius by ship from Boddam Island.
She grew up in the narrow street of two-room cottages I had seen, and she remembered it all well. There had been a shop, open once a week; she showed me a snapshot of the church. She also remembered the day the villagers were rounded up and told they had to leave.
It was the summer of 1971. "We
were told they were going to close down the islands," she told me, her rapid Creole translated by my taxi driver. "We were put on the boat by evening time. We were sealed down below, in a big iron hold. I was very upset. It took three days to get to Mauritius. There was nothing to eat, and very little to drink. I remember people squeezing flannels and cloths to get rain water to drink. It was terrible. We arrived at Port Louis, someone gave my father some money and we were told to find a home. And that was that."
I asked if she really wanted to go back. "We all want to go back. It is home, even if it is a simple place. I want to see it again, and remember."
At the time I asked the question it had suddenly become, at long last, a highly pertinent enquiry. Because last November, after three decades of legal wrangling, Olivier Bancoult, a mild-mannered, middle- aged islander who now works for the Mauritian Electricity Board, won leave - and British legal aid - to fight a case against the British Government.
He made the claim, in particular, that Section 4 of the BIOT Immigration Ordinance of 1971 was illegal. The Ordinance states baldly: "No person shall enter the Territory or, being in the Territory, shall be present or remain in the Territory, unless he is in possession of a permit or his name is endorsed on a permit . . . " The fact that "no person" meant in this case "the inhabitants" of the islands struck Bancoult as manifestly unjust.
On November 3, 2000, the High Court reached an astonishing verdict. Citing no less an authority than Magna Carta and its ancient provisions about the illegality of deporting any man from his own home, the court unanimously decided that Section 4 of the BIOT Immigration Ordinance was unlawful, that it should be quashed, and that Mr Bancoult and his fellow islanders should be allowed to go home.
Later the same day,
the Foreign Office
published a new Immigration Ordinance which confined the banning order only to the island of Diego Garcia itself. For the rest of the Chagos Archipelago, anyone who held a relevant British Dependent Territory Citizenship passport could now come and go as he or she pleased.
As I write, the British are shamed and embarrassed. The Mauritians are bewildered. And the Americans, not entirely unreasonably, are furious.
Eric Newsom, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Political- Military Affairs, wrote to his equivalent in the British Government last year claiming that settlements on the outer islands would "immediately raise the alarming prospect of the introduction of surveillance, monitoring and electronic jamming devices that have the potential to disrupt, compromise or place at risk vital military operations" conducted from Diego Garcia. Terrorists could operate from within the territory."
No American officials have spoken since about the problem thrown up by the court verdict. One American naval officer I met in Mauritius spoke disdainfully of "that Mickey Mouse court" in London, and the "total irrelevance" of the judges' decision.
Yet Bancoult and his lawyers - and British diplomats in private - have been saying that Americans holding such views are to be sorely disappointed. The islanders have already chartered a 120-berth Mauritian cargo ship, and had been planning to visit the islands in early November. And the Chagos Islands' own fishery protection vessel has in recent months chased away island-born fishermen who have tried to land on the outer islands - prompting an angry response from the islanders' London lawyer, Richard Gifford.
Although Gifford concedes that the November visit is likely to be abandoned, he adds that it is now within the absolute right of the islanders to go back if they wish: these are their islands, no matter what the defence emergency may be. The exiled population of the Chagos Islands is now thought to number 5,000. If many were to return, a whole new colony would be created.
Six months ago the Foreign Office was said to be "studying all possibilities". Today, it is doing no such thing. Squadrons of heavily armed planes are even now roaring onto the hugely expanded runway. The beacon on top of the water tower that proclaims "Diego Garcia - Footprint of Freedom" is acting as a homing signal to dozens of speeding ships, and the most important American base in the world is frantically preparing itself for war.
The atoll of Diego Garcia, the mightiest Indian Ocean relic of a once mighty British empire, is once again playing the crucial role for which she had been so artfully and cunningly designed.
A version of this article first appeared in Granta magazine
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Joined: Feb 2008
Posts: 1,067
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Feb 2008
Posts: 1,067 |
Yes I heard about this on a radio program recently. My forgettery was working overtime, but I was sure though that they were interviewing not just people from Mauritius but islanders who lived in Britain as well. I looked it up and found it on the web, it was a BBC program broadcast by our News Radio and also NPR in America I think, on 25th June. There is a town in England called Crawley in West Sussex where 2,000 of them live together. They too want to go back, but many can't afford it. Here is a BBC podcast of the story. Here's another interesting URL - The Provisional Peoples' Democratic Republic of Diego Garcia And another news story about the visit by Mauritian Chagossians and the protest by those living in Britain that they were not invited too.
Last edited by The Pook; 07/09/08 12:48 AM. Reason: Added stuff I found
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Joined: Dec 2006
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Dec 2006
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An impelling read that'd make a good doco.
“Diegogarcity” the appearance of a term in multiple sources shortly after you have looked it up in the dictionary.
Thats a funny coincidence.
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613 |
Simon Winchester is the author of the bestsellers The Map That Changed the World, The Professor and The Madman, and Krakatoa. He was a foreign correspondent ...
Harper Collins Publishers
I have to say, Mr. Winchester's writing style doesn't exactly keep my eyes glued to the pages. Nonetheless, what he has to say tends to be important. He seems to have a knack for picking subjects we should know more about but don't.
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