Home » The Chagos Islands Victims of a Half Century Crime – Gwynne Dyer

The Chagos Islands Victims of a Half Century Crime – Gwynne Dyer

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The Chagos Islands Victims of a Half Century Crime – Gwynne Dyer

February 25, 2022 12:45 pm

“The object of the operation is to occupy some stone that will remain ours … there must be no indigenous people apart from the seagulls”, wrote Paul Gore-Booth, a senior official of the British Foreign Office when, in 1966, the project to expel the two thousand inhabitants of the Chagos islands from their homes. “We absolutely must not compromise on this”.

And so it was. Six years later the inhabitants of the Chagos (ilois, as they call themselves) were rounded up, loaded onto ships and unloaded on the seafront of Port Louis, in the Mauritius archipelago, where most of them lived in absolute poverty until till today. This month, however, a large group returned to the islands aboard a Mauritius ship.

They can’t stay there yet. For the duration of the visit they were escorted by a British ‘fisheries protection’ vessel which, quite comically, declared that it was ‘collaborating in environmental research’. But now the balance is tipping so much in favor of the former inhabitants of the island that the British ship has not dared to block the Mauritius boat.

War on behalf of the United States
While the crew of their ship worked to define the maritime boundaries of the territory on behalf of the Mauritian government, the ilois revisited their old houses, now roofless and covered with vegetation. Then they had to return to Mauritius. But why were they forced into exile?

The crime Gore-Booth spoke shamelessly of in 1966 was committed on behalf of the United States. The Chagos Islands, an archipelago of 62 coral atolls in the middle of the Indian Ocean, would have been an ideal base for bombers, from which they could dominate much of South Asia and East Africa, and the Pentagon wanted them.

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The UK, as usual weak with the strong and strong with the weak, happily performed, but there was a problem. The Chagos Islands had been ruled as part of the British colony of Mauritius, which would become independent in 1968. The United States did not like the idea of ​​having an important strategic base in an independent African country, so something had to be done.

The solution obviously was to separate the Chagos Islands from Mauritius and declare them a British Indian Ocean Territory (Biot). No sooner said than done: offer the Mauritians three million pounds for the islands and tell them that they will not be able to have independence if they do not accept the agreement.

However, this happened in the midst of the decolonization process, when colonial territories of the whole “third world” claimed the right to self-determination. What if the ilois did the same? Well, then better move all the inhabitants to somewhere else.

A sentence not respected
And that’s exactly what the British did in 1972, declaring with a lie that there were no inhabitants on the island, only temporary workers. For fifty years the ilois have not been allowed to return and all the people who were born on the islands are aging, but their children and grandchildren have not forgotten.

Indeed, in 2000 they managed to wrest from the British courts a ruling that the expulsion was illegal and that required the British government to allow the islanders to return home. A sentence that perhaps would have been respected if 2001 had not brought with it the terrorist attacks of 11 September and the US base of Diego Garcia on the Chagos Islands had not become a strategic node in the “war against terrorism”.

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For twenty years, the American B52s that took off from the Chagos Islands bombed Afghanistan and Iraq at intervals, and Diego Garcia, with no civilian inhabitants, became a transit point for prisoners who were flown between the various American “secret places” scattered. all over the planet without a trace. The UK had chartered the islands for a long time, and the US had no plans to return them.

The UK insists on claiming sovereignty over the islands (although the US manages them), but since the International Court of Justice ruled in 2019 that the entire deportation process was illegal, the country is on the defensive. The sentence was supported by the UN general assembly and, more recently, by the international court of the law of the sea.

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It will take some time, but the US no longer badly needs a base in Diego Garcia, as it has access to airbases in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, all of which are much closer to action. . Furthermore, Mauritius has declared that the base can also remain where it is, as long as the islands are returned.

So soon the ilois will return home, and in the meantime here’s a curiosity. The Chagos archipelago sits atop a gigantic concave depression in the ocean, almost 100 meters deep. With the sea at its actual level, if it weren’t for the huge gravitational anomaly keeping that bowl open, the Chagos Islands would all be at the bottom of the ocean.

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(Translation by Giusy Muzzopappa)

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