Diego Garcia: no return to “torture island”
4:09 pm - October 24th 2008
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In the end, then, it was no surprise that the exiled Chagos Islanders’ right to return to their former homes was turned down by the Law Lords in London.
In the 1960s, Diego Garcia, the centerpiece of the Chagos Islands (which are part of the British Overseas Territories) was leased to the United States for use as a strategically important airbase.
The deal had two crucial components: one was a sizeable discount on Trident Polaris, Britain’s nuclear missile programme, and the other was the removal from the islands (to a life of poverty in Mauritius and the Seychelles) of the 2,000 inconvenient British subjects (the “residents”), who traced their ancestry back nearly 200 years to African- and Indian-born labourers from Mauritius, shipped in by French coconut planters in the years before Napoleon’s fall and the transfer of the islands’ sovereignty to the UK.
To be honest, the Chagossians never stood a chance, even though their long legal struggle had secured significant victories. In 2000, when the High Court ruled that the islanders’ expulsion had been illegal, foreign secretary Robin Cook made it clear that he supported their case, but was overruled by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who blocked their return by “orders in council,” an ancient royal prerogative that conveniently bypassed parliament.
In 2006, three judges, declaring that Blair’s actions were illegitimate, upheld the islanders’ right to return, ordering the government to pay their legal costs and attempting to withhold support for an appeal to the House of Lords, and in May 2007 the court of appeal upheld that decision, ruling that the British government’s removal of the men, who, as the Guardian explained, were “tricked out of their homes, encouraged to leave on temporary trips, and not allowed back,” was an “abuse of power.”
Nevertheless, the importance of Diego Garcia to the US government in the years since the 9/11 attacks has ensured that Tony Blair’s relentless support of the Bush administration would trump Robin Cook’s almost forgotten attempts to secure an “ethical” foreign policy for the UK. In the persistent warmongering of the last seven years, Diego Garcia’s strategic importance to the US has been more pronounced than ever.
The first ground troops in the Afghan invasion set off from Diego Garcia, countless bombers have used the base as they have embarked on the missions that have killed so many civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, perhaps most importantly, other planes have arrived bearing precious cargo: allegedly important prisoners in the “War on Terror.” Some, like the Australian David Hicks and Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, were interrogated, in the early days of the “War on Terror,” in the bowels of ships moored off the coast of Diego Garcia, and others, it appears, were held in a secret prison on Diego Garcia itself, as I reported in an article this summer.
Set against such an important component in the “War on Terror,” therefore, it was clear that the demands of the Chagossians were never going to succeed. However, what made the verdict particularly galling, beyond the spinelessness of the Lords, was a statement by the current foreign secretary David Miliband — who has yet to explain in a satisfactory manner if the British government actually knew anything about a secret prison on Diego Garcia — in which he noted “the government’s regret at the way the resettlement of the Chagossians was carried out in the 1960s and 1970s and at the hardship that followed for some of them.”
It was a classic New Labour moment: an apparent gesture of contrition from a government that likes to say sorry for historic crimes, but that refuses to do anything about its own.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and a regular commentator on US politics and the “War on Terror.” Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk
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This is a guest post. Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. Blogging at www.andyworthington.co.uk
· Other posts by Andy Worthington
Story Filed Under: Blog ,Foreign affairs ,Labour party ,United States
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Reader comments
The deal had two crucial components: one was a sizeable discount on Trident, Britain’s nuclear missile programme
A slight correction, Andy – its was on the Polaris system that we got the discount.
Trident came later although I dare say we’ll be getting a discount on the next generation of nukes in return for extending the lease.
The other realpoltik element of the deal was that we could no longer afford to sustain a large scale naval presence in the Indian Ocean, hence we passed that on to the US,
My apologies, Unity. You’re right, of course. I was caught up in some kind of nuclear missile time-warp there …
I also appreciate your comment abut the other realpolitik element of the “lease”. I found this very well expressed in Mark Curtis’ ‘Unpeople”, in which the post-war “special relationship” often involved the British standing very close to the Americans, whispering advice about how to run a global empire based on their experience, and hoping, of course, to pick up some of the business.
Did anyone read the archaic language used by David Miliband’s QC, Jonathan Crow, in last week’s hearing. Harking back to the days of empire, he dismissed the Chagossians’ claim in these words: “They have no property rights on the islands at all. What is being asserted is a right of mass trespass.”
Mass trespass in their own land. Whatever next?
Incidentally, John Pilger’s book Freedom Next Time has a chapter devoted to the shocking treatment of the Chagossians and is well worth a read.
MASS TRESPASS
In England trespass is not a criminal offence: yet; but jewish David Miliband and his ilk must realise that under international law: mass trespass, mass expulsion of the indigenous population, mass murder et al . are illegal under any jew free civilized legal system. Chagossians and Palestinians deserve fair treatment and not the hypocritical dictates of the international jew.
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